nodejs-memory-test

A test program to estimate how much heap memory is available to a Node.js application.

This example code accompanies the book Data Wrangling with JavaScript.

There is also a related blog post and video.

You can support my work here

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Setup

Clone the repo to your local hard drive and change directory to the repo.

No dependencies are required.

Run

To determine the largest amount of memory that can be allocated in Node.js run:

node index.js

Let this run for a while and it will eventually abort with a fatal out of memory error like this:

FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory

The last line of text printed tells you the total amount of heap memory available to your application under Node.js.

Now try increasing heap memory, add the '--max-old-space-size' command line parameter as follows and run it again:

node --max-old-space-size=6000 index.js

You should now have much more heap memory to play with!