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I'm running node.js on a Raspberry Pi 3 B with the following free memory:

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           973        230        742          6         14        135
-/+ buffers/cache:         80        892
Swap:           99          0         99

How can I configure node (v7) to not use all the free memory? To prolong the SD card life, I would like to prevent it from going to swap.

I am aware of --max_old_space_size:

node --v8-options | grep -A 5 max_old
  --max_old_space_size (max size of the old space (in Mbytes))
        type: int  default: 0

I know some of the answer is application specific, however what are some general tips to limit node.js memory consumption to prevent swapping? Also any other tips to squeeze more free ram out of the pi would be appreciated.

I have already set the memory split so that the GPU has the minimum 16 megs of RAM allocated.

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4

The only bulletproof way to prevent swapping is to turn off swapping in the operating system (delete or comment out any swap lines in /etc/fstab for permanent settings, or use swapoff -a to turn off all swap devices for the current session). Note that the kernel is forced to kill random processes when there is no free memory available (this is true both with and without swap).

In node.js, what you can limit is the size of V8's managed heap, and the --max-old-space-size flag you already mentioned is the primary way for doing that. A value around 400-500 (megabytes) probably makes sense for your Raspberry. There's also --max-semi-space-size which should be small and you can probably just stick with the default, and --max-executable-size for generated code (how much you need depends on the app you run; I'd just stick with the default).

That said, there's no way to limit the overall memory usage of the process, because there are other memory consumers outside the managed heap (e.g. node.js itself, V8's parser and compiler). There is no way to set limits on all kinds of memory usage. (Because what would such a limit do? Crash when memory is needed but not available? The kernel will take care of that anyway.)

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