What are core files by node.js

Question

As shown above, my newly installed node.js app directory has a lot of core.* files. What are these, and what is their purpose? Can I delete these files?

I installed node.js behind apache with mod_proxy to can use one of my domain on port 80. Then I installed forever. Sometimes I have problems stopping node.js with:

`forever stop server.js`

Maybe that is causing those dumps? Can someone explain why these are appearing?

After all the problem found it's answer my VM's processes are limited on a given number.Node used with apache seems to be the background

-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory

Answer 1

core.<number> files are typically memory dumps created on Linux systems. The <number> is the Process ID of the process that crashed.

I guess your Node.JS application has crashed a number of times and these are the memory dumps left there for you to debug.

Answer 2

Yea that's not normal if they are in your project file. To all the people that are downvoting his question, it's a question perfectly worth asking especially if it's in the app folder.

fefe: Can you see any sub dir within the core dir?

those look like memory dumps. So I guess you should be fine to delete them unless you want to go through them for debugging purposes.

Give this a try for debugging those crashes: https://github.com/ddopson/node-segfault-handler