A systems administrator is investigating reports of progressively degrading performance on a critical application server. The server becomes noticeably slower over several days after each reboot, eventually requiring another restart to restore normal operation. The administrator observes the following while the server is performing poorly:
CPU utilization is moderate.
Disk I/O is within normal parameters.
Network latency to and from the server is low.
A specific application's process shows its memory commitment continuously growing over time, far exceeding its typical baseline.
What is the MOST likely cause of the server's slow performance?
The correct answer is a memory leak. The key symptoms described in the scenario all point to a memory leak. A memory leak occurs when an application allocates memory but fails to release it when it is no longer needed. This causes the application's memory usage to grow continuously over time, consuming available RAM and forcing the operating system to rely more heavily on slower disk-based virtual memory (paging), which degrades overall system performance. A reboot temporarily resolves the problem because it clears all RAM, including the leaked memory allocations, but the leak will begin again once the faulty application is running.
Improper CPU affinity can cause performance issues by inefficiently scheduling tasks, but it would not cause memory usage to grow steadily over time.
While full system disks can cause severe performance problems, the scenario states that disk I/O is normal, making this unlikely.
Clock skew primarily affects time-sensitive operations like network authentication and log correlation, not general system responsiveness through continuous resource depletion.
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