node.js - NodeJs slowing down when process consuming big amount of memory

Question

So, i have a nodejs process which is, when scaled consumes around 5-8gb of RAM. It is running within the docker container. launching with the arg --max-old-space-size=12192 to increase the node process limit.

The memory consumption is OK, since i try to use a dedicated server (AMD EPYC CPU, 64GB memory) in place of the horizontal scaling with AWS or other cloud provider, because it is 10x cheaper in case if i can make it work on dedicated server (most of expenses for AWS/Google Cloud goes for network traffic, while the VDS have unlimited. The network side is already optimised with the use of GraphQL and minimising the amount of requests). The process itself processes huge amount of data in memory, in multithreaded fashion. There is no further significant optimisation from the side of the process code itself.

When the process memory consumption reaches 3Gb+, it is significantly slowing down. Docker is not limiting the container resources. The server itself is running on 5-10% load in terms of memory and CPU. SSD driver -> low drive load (low amount of I/O on the server side).

I guess re-writing the app to golang for example might improve it significantly, however that is really a lot of work.

Anything can be done on the server setup / nodejs app side to prevent slowing down?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Solved by horizontal scaling within a single VDS with docker.

As jfriend00 noticed, the nature of the problem might be with the garbage collection - personally have no other guess.