With RAM typically in the Gigabytes on all PC's now, should I be spending time hunting down all the small (non-growing) memory leaks that may be in my program? I'm talking about those holes that may be less than 64 bytes, or even a bunch that are just 4 bytes.
Some of these are very difficult to identify because they are not in my own code, but may be in third party code or in the development tool's code, and I may not even have direct access to the source. In those cases, it would involve lengthy communication with the vendors of these products.
I have seen the number one memory leak question here at SO: Are memory leaks ever ok? and the number one answer to that, as of now voted up 85 times, is: No.
But here I'm talking about small leaks that may take an inordinate amount of debugging, research and communication to track down.
And I'm only talking about a simple desktop app. I understand that apps running on servers must be as tight as possible.
So the question I am really asking is, if I know I have a program that leaks, say 40 bytes every time it is run, does that matter?
(source: beholdgenealogy.com)
Also see my followup question: What Operating Systems Will Free The Memory Leaks?
Postscript: I just purchased EurekaLog for my program development.