What occurs if profiling remains activated after its intended use?

When profiling remains activated after its intended use, it continues to capture profiles for every operation called. This means that the system is constantly monitoring and recording performance data, which can lead to an accumulation of unnecessary information.

While this data may be useful during the debugging and optimization process, it can degrade performance over time, as resources are being used to track and store profiling information. It is generally advisable to turn off profiling once the necessary data has been gathered to avoid potential overhead and ensure that system resources are focused on executing application logic rather than on performance monitoring.

In contrast to the other options, which suggest that profiling either has no impact on performance, that it would disable itself, or that it could cause server crashes, the reality is that continuous profiling without a clear purpose tends to lead to performance degradation rather than immediate failure.