How to spot and fix memory leaks in Go

Memory leaks occur when a program fails to release memory it no longer needs, leading to increased memory usage and potential system instability or crashes. Modern programming languages like Go have built-in garbage collection mechanisms to manage memory, but memory leaks can still happen due to unbounded resource creation, long-lived references, improper goroutine management, deferred function calls, and not stopping time.tickers. To identify memory leaks, monitor a program's memory consumption over time for specific patterns like gradual growth or abrupt drops. Code profiling tools such as pprof can help analyze resource usage and visualize critical code paths. Continuous profiling with products like Datadog Continuous Profiler allows for real-time monitoring of resource usage in production environments, making it easier to troubleshoot memory leaks and other performance issues.