In this article, you’ll learn how to understand and debug the memory usage of a Node.js application and use monitoring tools to get a complete insight into what is happening with the heap memory and garbage collection. Here’s what you’ll get by the end of this tutorial. Memory leaks often go unnoticed. This is why I suggest using a tool to keep track of historical data of garbage collection cycles and to notify you if the heap memory usage starts spiking uncontrollably.

All the applications that you’re trying to execute require memory. It doesn’t matter if the application was developed using assembly language. Or if you used a low-level programming language like C or a language compiled to a bytecode like Java. Running the application requires memory for the code itself, the variables, and the data that the code processes. Depending on your usage, the memory requirements will vary.