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.

It’s virtually impossible to manage today’s complex IT environments at scale without a comprehensive system monitoring solution that allows you to check the health of all your applications and services from a single pane of glass. When your end users are experiencing difficulties, you must have such a tool in place that lets you quickly ascertain and remediate the root cause of the slowdown or error.

Whether you capture them for application security and compliance, production monitoring, performance monitoring, or troubleshooting, logs contain valuable information about the health of your apps. But it all comes down to what and how you log, which is where log management tools come into play.

“Solr or Elasticsearch?”…well, at least that is the common question we hear from Sematext’s consulting services clients and prospects. Which one is better, Solr or Elasticsearch? Which one is faster? Which one scales better? Which one is easier to manage? Which one should we use? Is there any advantage to migrating from Solr to Elasticsearch? – and the list goes on.

There are a lot of reasons why people choose to shop at one online store over another or pick one streaming service over another from the type of service they are getting to pricing, quality and, you’ve guessed it from the title, speed. The speed to which I’m referring is the speed at which the website loads and reacts to user input. In one of my previous articles about netwok latency, I’ve talked about how big of a difference even a two-second extra delay makes.

On December 9, 2021, a vulnerability was reported that could allow a system running Apache Log4j 2 version 2.14.1 or below to be compromised and allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable server. This vulnerability was registered on the National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2021-44228, with a severity score of 10. Here is a diagram of the attack chain from the Swiss Government Computer Emergency Response Team (GovCERT).

Three seconds is all it takes before your customer decides to leave. Would you imagine that! The audacity of some people! But, can you really blame them? We live in a fast-paced world. Wasting people’s time is worse than wasting their money. Developers are striving to provide value in as short of time as possible. Just as I am now writing this tutorial. I’m adamant about not wasting your time but providing you with concrete info for you to learn something new.

Apache – the technology that powers the web. I’m not sure if that is correct, but I think that we wouldn’t see the world wide web in its current shape without it. Launched in 1995 and since April 1996, it has been the most popular web server around the world. Because of handling your users’ requests, Apache serves as the front application. It is crucial to understand what your server is doing, what file users are accessing, from where they came, and much, much more.

NGINX is a popular web server featuring a wide range of capabilities, including reverse proxy, mail proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancing. It offers TLS offloading and a health check of the backends and supports gRPC, WebSocket, and HTTP/2. In short, NGINX is a one-stop solution for most of your web server needs. When using NGINX, monitoring its metrics is crucial for tackling issues.