What are common memory leak patterns in Node.js?
Forgotten event listeners (always remove them on cleanup), global caches that grow without bounds, and closures that capture large objects unnecessarily. Fix these by cleaning up listeners, bounding caches, and being careful with closures in long-running code.
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More FAQs in Garbage Collection in V8 and Node.js Explained
V8 uses a generational garbage collector. New objects are in the young generation, collected often (minor GC). Long-lived objects move to the old generation, collected less often (major GC). The GC finds unreachable objects and frees their memory automatically.
Minor GC (scavenge) collects the young generation, which is fast and frequent. Major GC (mark-sweep or mark-compact) collects the old generation, which is slower and less frequent. The split makes garbage collection efficient.
When objects are still referenced unintentionally. A forgotten event listener keeping an object alive, a closure capturing more than it needs, or a global cache growing without bounds. These prevent GC from freeing memory, since the objects are still reachable.
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