Well, if it was really leaking memory after the program has exited, that would be an OS problem, not the fault of the tool. The OS is responsible for managing the memory heap - and when a program exits, the OS gets the memory back - and so if it is not allowing it to be re-used, the OS is at fault.

However, be wary that "top" does not necessarily tell you the amount of free memory - Linux uses that memory for other things (file caching, I think, if I remember rightly), and so it doesn't show up in the "free" memory in top - but as soon as another application comes along and needs it, it should be available to that application. That's the idea anyway...

The other alternative is that there is still some process running which is hogging the memory. We often get people pointing out all the many java processes running - but these are a consequence of the way that java threads are implemented on Linux - as separate processes using shared memory.

Regards,

Andrew.