Node Cookbook - Third Edition

Visualizing memory usage in the Terminal

There are plenty of tools for visualizing a processes memory usage; however, these will only supply total memory usage.

We can get a more granular breakdown of memory by asking V8.

Node's process.memoryUsage function will output three memory usage figures, the Resident Set Size (rss), Total Heap Size (heapTotal), and Heap Used (heapUsed):

$ node -p "process.memoryUsage()"{ rss: 19095552, heapTotal: 8425472, heapUsed: 3949936 }  

These terms are relevant to V8's memory scheme. The Resident Set is the amount of memory a process has allocated for itself - the total memory that has been reserved. Similarly, the Total Heap Size is also an amount of memory set aside by the process for the heap. Finally, ...