As a Software Developer at TechSolutions, I've had a hands-on experience dealing with memory leaks. In one of our applications, we were seeing progressive slowdowns and random crashes. Using a profiler, I conducted a deep investigation and discovered that our memory usage was continually increasing over time, indicating a memory leak. I found it difficult to directly identify the specific cause because our application was rich in features.
After separating and testing different parts of the application, I discovered that one component was not releasing memory after it finished its operation, it was a recursive function within a feature that was not deallocating the memory after each run. To visualize memory usage patterns better, I used Visual Studio Diagnostic Tools and .NET Memory Profiler. After locating the problematic component, we modified the code to ensure memory release and re-tested the application, and the memory leak was resolved. This dramatically improved the application's stability and performance.