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Measuring free memory is not an appropriate way to check for a memory leak, for a couple of reasons:

• If there is lots of free memory, the OS may use it as a disk cache whenever it wants to (this is probably what you're seeing)
• There are many other processes running on your system, and their memory consumption may vary.

If you want to check for memory leaks, use a memory check tool such as valgrind; these can track that each memory allocation call has a matching deallocation call, and can even give you hints about which allocations may be the source of memory leaks.