Will killing a process recover leaked memory?

Question

For example, when a particular application runs, it causes 10M of memory leaks. If I kill the process, will the 10M be recovered by the system?

I tried to check myself:

• I created an application that will cause 10M memory leak.
• Before I run it, I used "Memory Doctor" to check my free memory. (250.4M)
• After I run and kill it, the "Memory Doctor" show my free memory is 240M.

I want to confirm: when the application killed, will the memory consumed by the process be reclaimed by the operating system or not?

Answer 1

Yes, killed processes will return any used memory to the operating system.

Keep in mind that any filesystem cache used by the application may not be free'd immediately.