A system and method for detecting memory leaks in a garbage collected
environment. In particular, the present invention provides a mechanism by
which objects in the memory space of a virtual machine are analyzed as to
whether they are warm or cold, i.e., how long they have persisted in
memory without being accessed or referenced by another object. Following
this analysis, the objects are clustered into groups of warm or cold
objects, and any links from warm clusters to cold clusters are
determined. This information is then provided to the software developer
for use in detecting and analyzing potential memory leaks.