How to prevent memory leaks in node.js?

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As far as I know the V8 engine doesn’t
do any garbage collection.

V8 has a powerful and intelligent garbage collector in build.

Your main problem is not understanding how closures maintain a reference to scope and context of outer functions. This means there are various ways you can create circular references or otherwise create variables that just do not get cleaned up.

This is because your code is ambigious and the compiler can not tell if it is safe to garbage collect it.

A way to force the GC to pick up data is to null your variables.

function(foo, cb) {
    var bigObject = new BigObject();
    doFoo(foo).on("change", function(e) {
         if (e.type === bigObject.type) {
              cb();
              // bigObject = null;
         }
    });
}

How does v8 know whether it is safe to garbage collect big object when it’s in an event handler? It doesn’t so you need to tell it it’s no longer used by setting the variable to null.

Various articles to read:

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