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.