A system administrator notices that a server is consistently getting slower and less responsive the longer it has been since the last reboot. Once the server is rebooted, the system performs at the…

OS performance misconfiguration would produce consistently poor performance from the start rather than a gradual decline that resets after reboot.

A memory leak occurs when a service or application continuously allocates memory but fails to release it after use, causing total available RAM to shrink over time. After a reboot, all memory is reclaimed and the system returns to baseline, but the leak resumes and memory is exhausted again, eventually making the system unresponsive. This cycle of post-reboot recovery followed by gradual degradation is the definitive symptom of a memory leak rather than a configuration or hardware problem.

Incorrect server resource specifications - such as insufficient CPU or RAM provisioning - would result in consistently poor performance, not a pattern that resets after a reboot.

Corrupted application files typically cause immediate crashes or specific functional errors rather than a slow, progressive degradation of system-wide responsiveness.