What is the difference between minor and major GC in V8?
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.
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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.
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.
Use the Node.js inspector and heap snapshots. Take a snapshot, run your code, take another, and compare. Growing objects between snapshots point to the leak. This is the standard way to find leaks in production Node.js apps.
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