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World Congress 2026 Europe - Virtual Stage • Jul 2, 2026 • Session details

The Memory Leak That Ate Our Cluster: A Postmortem

Dina Matveev

A persistent Puppeteer memory leak was silently eating our Node.js cluster. Discover how we finally eliminated OOM crashes and zombie processes using disposable contexts and OS-level process management.

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#1 about 2 min

Architecture context and out of memory cluster crashes

A document generation API experiences severe instability as pods unexpectedly crash from out-of-memory errors.

#2 about 2 min

Testing naive solutions with more pods and memory

Increasing pod counts and doubling RAM limits fail to resolve persistent memory leaks.

#3 about 2 min

Visualizing memory limits and isolating suspicious endpoints

Creating a Datadog dashboard reveals gradual memory hoarding and correlates spikes to specific API endpoints.

#4 about 2 min

Investigating database connections and node heap dumps

Checking open database connections and profiling the node heap fails to explain the memory magnitude.

#5 about 2 min

Analyzing screenshot generation and puppeteer library versions

Upgrading Puppeteer does not resolve the memory climb caused by underlying code implementation flaws.

#6 about 2 min

Identifying memory accumulation in singleton browser patterns

Reusing a single Chrome instance to save overhead leads to massive accumulations of cache and unclosed resources.

#7 about 2 min

Attempting browser isolation with one instance per request

Launching a fresh Chromium instance for every request prevents shared state but still results in memory errors.

#8 about 3 min

Uncovering unclosed zombie processes in the operating system

Treating Puppeteer as a process manager reveals that failed requests leave unused Chromium zombies hoarding memory.

#9 about 2 min

Implementing incognito contexts for performance and state isolation

Using a single Chrome process with separate disposable window contexts resolves the memory leak entirely.

#10 about 1 min

Destroying zombie processes by enabling init in Docker

Adding the init process to Docker Compose automatically adopts and collects exit statuses for orphaned child processes.

#11 about 1 min

Preventing resource exhaustion by defining browser task timeouts

Setting strict timeouts on page navigations and interactions stops frozen browsers from permanently holding memory slots.

#12 about 3 min

Customizing Chrome launch flags for headless server environments

Disabling extensions, bypassing shared memory limits, and dropping GPU rendering drastically improves stability.

Matching moments

2:15 min

Browser developer tools for detecting memory leaks

Alex Gorbunov Alex Gorbunov · Europe 2026 Virtual

2:51 min

Managing browser memory usage across Chromium environments

Chris Heilmann +2 · LIVE

3:32 min

Isolating metaspace memory leaks with a minimal reproducer

Marco Sussitz Marco Sussitz · WWC Europe 2026

2:11 min

Containerizing Puppeteer and Chromium within Docker environments

Miki Lombardi · JS Congress

2:17 min

Debugging isolated contexts and managing dynamic browser memory

Igor Minar Igor Minar +1 · WWC 2025

2:26 min

Understanding Puppeteer and its underlying architectural design

Miki Lombardi · JS Congress

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