CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsmemory-leaks
Gergely Németh
Gergely Németh

Reputation: 1435

Node.js Request memory leaking

Given the following code snippet:

var request = require('request');
function getGoogle() {

  request('http://www.google.com', function (error, response, body) {
      if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
      //console.log(body) // Print the google web page.
      }
  });
}
setInterval(getGoogle, 1000);

Using Node version 0.10.17, this code leaks. Any ideas why?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 6440

Answers (2)

Bas
Bas

Reputation: 11

In this page (http://www.joyent.com/blog/walmart-node-js-memory-leak) they actually found a memory leak in the http stack of Node.JS

The good news is that it is fixed in Node.JS version v0.10.22

Upvotes: 1

Andreas Hultgren
Andreas Hultgren

Reputation: 14963

I see a lot of questions where people go "aw my gawd memory leak!" based on the first few minutes of the app running, without waiting to see if the process hits a ceiling or actually runs out of memory. Node just uses as much memory as allowed to.

See the following rough benchmark. I ran your code (with a timeout of 100 instead), and the memory-usage rapidly increased to ~70 MB, but then stopped. The first column is memory usage.

27368  0:00.36 node test.js
40644  0:00.82 node test.js
47468  0:01.21 node test.js
48192  0:01.40 node test.js
67952  0:02.39 node test.js
69448  0:03.29 node test.js # Increasing fast til around here
70016  0:04.46 node test.js
70624  0:07.43 node test.js
70944  0:10.59 node test.js
71612  0:13.63 node test.js
73120  0:16.83 node test.js
70864  0:18.17 node test.js # Look it's decreasing
67780  0:42.27 node test.js # Considerably later it's even lower!

My guess at why it's like this would be because garbage collection is expensive, but I'm not sure and would be happy if anyone had a real explanation and references.

Upvotes: 2

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