For short-lived programs perhaps. For things like servers that may run for months, leaks are absolutely important. Even memory fragmentation is a problem for

For short-lived programs perhaps. For things like servers that may run for months, leaks are absolutely important. Even memory fragmentation is a problem for us. We once had a chat server that would crash every 3 months, which we tracked down to memory being fragmented by a less than optimal malloc implementation in glibc. (Since the glibc fix was in the "too hard" category, we reluctantly decided to schedule a restart every month.)