SummaryPlatforms with automatic memory management, such as the JVM, are usually considered free of memory leaks. However, memory leaks can happen in such environments, as the garbage collector cannot free objects, which are not used by the application anymore, but are still referenced. Such unused objects can eventually fill up the heap and crash the application. Although this problem has been studied extensively, nevertheless, there are still many rooms for improvement in this area. This paper describes the statistical approach for memory leak detection, as an alternative, along with a commercial tool, Plumbr, which is based on the method. The tool is later analyzed with three case studies of real applications and in the process also analyzes strengths and weaknesses of the statistical approach for memory leak detection. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.