Dan Shappir @ NodeTLV '25 | Using Heap Dumps to Find and Fix Node.js Memory and CPU Problems

NodeTLV 2025
www.nodetlv.com
Israel's Annual Node.js conference

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JavaScript uses Garbage Collection (GC) for memory management. As a result, many developers that use JavaScript based systems, such as NodeJS, assume that they’re free of memory issues. Unfortunately this is incorrect, and many NodeJS-based services suffer from memory management problems such as leaks and excessive GC CPU cost. But finding, understanding, and resolving memory issues can be very challenging, because a problem in any part of the application impacts the application as a whole. Also, they may only manifest under load, in production environments. In this session I will explain how to find and fix such issues using the heap dump feature that is built into NodeJS. And I will show how to use the DevTools memory panel to analyze such dumps.

Dan Shappir is Principal Engineer at Sisense. Previously he was Performance Tech Lead at NEXT Insurance and at Wix. Dan has over 25 years of software development experience, and has worked on systems ranging from multiuser games to missile trajectory simulations to designing and building very large scale Web applications. He is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, a host on the JavaScript popular Jabber podcast, and an Invited Expert on the W3C Web Performance Working Group. Dan holds an MSc in Computer Science.