RSS memory increases while heap is stable

[Darren Whitlen]

Hi,

There have been several memory related posts in the past, a lot of them with fixes and even more without getting to any conclusion.

Here is a memory graph of one of my production server instances for a nodejs process: http://i.imgur.com/25c0fih.png

What happens is that that the RSS memory continues to grow until it reaches just under the 1GB mark, then idles around that area without ever dropping. The heap is always between 100-200mb in size.

This happens on all my servers running Ubuntu 12.04; Nodejs version 0.10.26  installed from the PPA mentioned on the wiki page "Installing Node.js via package manager".

My question is, *why* would the RSS memory size keep increasing upto 1GB while the heap stays as low as 200mb and *how* can I find out the cause so I can resolve the issue?

Thanks,

Darren

[Shawn Parrish]

Brandon's answer here is the best I've seen.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20842730/why-does-nodejs-memory-keeps-on-growing-in-this-test

Shawn Parrish
NodePing
https://nodeping.com
Server monitoring, including websocket and socket.io

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[Darren Whitlen]

This is not the same issue as in that case the heap usage was ever increasing due to mis-using `delete`. However in the graph I show the heap usage is stable at over 700mb less than the increasing RSS usage.

Darren