JavaScript uses Garbage Collection (GC) for memory management. As a result, many developers that use JavaScript based systems, such as NodeJS, assume that they’re free of memory issues. Unfortunately this is incorrect, and many NodeJS-based services suffer from memory management problems such as leaks and excessive GC CPU cost. But finding, understanding, and resolving memory issues can be very challenging, because a problem in any part of the application impacts the application as a whole. Also, they may only manifest under load, in production environments. In this session I will explain how to find and fix such issues using the heap dump feature that is built into NodeJS. And I will show how to use the DevTools memory panel to analyze such dumps.
This talk has been presented at JSNation 2026, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.




















