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 Web Engineering Summit 2026, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.




















