Programming Tutorials

  There are few sights more frustrating in a Node.js backend environment than checking your logs and seeing the dreaded crash signature: FATAL ERROR: Reached heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory This error frequently occurs during ETL operations, such as processing multi-gigabyte CSVs, parsing JSON streams, or migrating database records. While increasing the memory limit ( --max-old-space-size ) offers a temporary band-aid, it is not a solution. It merely delays the inevitable crash as your dataset grows. The root cause is rarely the file size itself, but rather a mismanagement of  backpressure . When your reading stream (the Producer) pushes data into the internal buffer faster than your writing stream (the Consumer) can process it, the memory usage balloons until the V8 heap is exhausted. The Mechanics of a Heap Overflow To solve the problem, we must understand the architecture of Node.js streams. All Node.js streams (Readable, Writable, Transform) ut...