Node.js "FATAL ERROR: JS Allocation failed - process out of memory" -- possible to get a stack trace?

Question

Well... I'm back to square one. I can't figure this out for the life of me.

I'm getting the following error:

FATAL ERROR: JS Allocation failed - process out of memory 

I could enumerate the dozens (yes, dozens) of things I've tried to get to the root of this problem, but really it would be far too much. So here are the key points:

• I can only get it to happen on my production server, and my app is large and complicated, so it is proving very difficult to isolate
• It happens even though heap size & RSS size are both < 200 Mb, which should not be a problem given that the machines (Amazon Cloud, CentOS, m1.large) have 8Gb RAM

My assumption is that (because of the 2nd point), a leak is probably not the cause; rather, it seems like there's probably a SINGLE object that is very large. The following thread backs up this theory:: In Node.js using JSON.stringify results in 'process out of memory' error

What I really need is some way to find out what the state of the memory is at the moment the application crashes, or perhaps a stack trace leading up to the FATAL ERROR.

Based upon my assumption above, a 10-minute-old heap dump is insufficient (since the object would have not resided in memory).

Answer 1

Just because this is the top answer on Google at the moment, I figured I'd add a solution for a case I just ran across:

I had this issue using express with ejs templates - the issue was that I failed to close an ejs block, and the file was js code - something like this:

var url = '<%=getUrl("/some/url")' /* lots more javascript that ejs tries to parse in memory apparently */ 

This is obviously a super specific case, OP's solution should be used the majority of the time. However, OP's solution would not work for this (ejs stack trace won't be surfaced by ofe).