An administrator is troubleshooting a long-running scientific simulation on a Linux workstation. Over several days, the output of free -h shows available RAM steadily dropping while the RES column of the simulation process in top keeps increasing. No other significant workload is present. If this condition continues unchecked, which system-level effect is most likely to occur first?
The system will run out of free memory and begin swapping heavily.
Additional disk space will be consumed until the root filesystem fills.
CPU utilization on all cores will spike to near 100 percent.
TCP retransmissions will increase, causing network throughput to drop.
A process that leaks memory continuously allocates RAM that it never releases. As physical memory is consumed, the kernel must free pages by swapping them to disk. Once both RAM and swap space are depleted, the kernel's Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer selects and terminates processes. Therefore the immediate consequence is exhaustion of available memory, not increased CPU usage, extra disk capacity consumption, or network degradation.
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