Detect memory leak of a running process

[htonivi]

Please let me know, how to detect if the application has memory leak in linux platform. Which command/tool and what counters to track, to confidently say that the process leaks memory ?

Or in other words, how do i find memory leak of a running process ?

[helios]

The easiest way is using a system monitor and see how much memory the process is using. If you notice that memory is only being allocated but never freed, it's likely you have a memory leak (the exact behavior will depend on the type of program and operation being performed, of course).

The way to actually make sure you have memory leaks is using a memory debugger.
I've used Valgrind to find memory leaks and buffer overruns and found it useful, despite its huge CPU overhead.