For a 64 bit OS, is memory leakage still relevant?

Question

If you have a 64 bit OS, you have an address space of virtually unlimited size. So my question is, does on such systems freeing memory matters much? Even if you have limited RAM of say 4 GB, in a demand paging scheme (memory only brought in when touched), the little overhead you would get as compared to freeing memory, is a few extra page swaps I guess, as memory you will not touch for a long time, will automatically be swapped. Am I missing something here? Or is my argument valid?

Practically, if it is not a big performance hit, then I guess its a good thing for C/C++ programmers, as memory leakage would no more be an important issue to deal with!

Answer 1

overhead ... is a few extra page swaps ... as memory ... will automatically be swapped

Automatically be swapped to where? The ether? Page files are finite, as is the storage they exist on.

Do you think it's a good idea never to free memory in a long running service application?