I have an EKS cluster with a nodejs application running in the pods. I have noticed that if the memory of the nodejs application increases beyond 512MB it just crashes. I have increased the pod memory but how do I increase the nodejs memory as well.

Do you have limits set on the containers and pod?

What kind of limits are you talking about?

We've been able to run NodeJS apps with more memory with the

--max-old-space-size=<size in MB>

flag in a

NODE_OPTIONS

env var for the pod. Then set the pod memory request and limit at a slightly higher value. We keep pod's memory request and limit at the same value, which is a conservative approach, depending on your workload you might have the memory request a bit lower than the limit, to optimize for the scenario that not all pods actually use memory up to their limit.

Node.js has a default memory limit of 512MB. This limit can be increased using the

--max-old-space-size

flag. The value for this flag is specified in megabytes. Also, you will need to update your Kubernetes deployment YAML file to include the

--max-old-space-size

flag in the command or args section of your container definition. Once you have updated the deployment YAML file, apply the changes using kubectl and monitor the application

On the other hand, one should optimize the app itself, as a memory leak would happen sooner or later, increasing the memory has just shifted it away.