Your Node is Leaking Memory? setTimeout Could be the Reason
This is mostly an FYI for node developers. The issue being discussed in this post has caused us quite a bit of pain. It has to do with how node deals with timeouts. In short: you can very easily create memory leaks [1] with the setTimeout API in node. You're probably familiar with that API since it's one that browsers provide for many, many years. The API is pretty straightforward: you schedule a function to be called later, and you get a token back that can be used to clear the timeout later. In short:
In the browser the token returned is just a number. If you do the same thing in node however, the token ends up being an actual Timeout object:
This “leaks” out some of the internals of how the timeout is implemented internally. For the last few years I think this has been just fine. Typically you used this object primarily as a token similar to how you would do that with a number. Might look something like this:
For the lifetime of MyThing, even after clearTimeout has been called or the timeout runs to completion, the object holds on to this timeout. While on completion or cancellation, the timeout is marked as “destroyed” in node terms and removed from it's internal tracking. What however happens is that this Timeout object is actually surviving until someone overrides or deletes the this.timeout reference. That's because the actual Timeout object is held and not just some token. This further means that the garbage collector won't actually collect this thing at all and everything that it references. This does not seem too bad as the Timeout seems somewhat hefty, but not too hefty. The most problematic part is most likely the _onTimeout member on it which might pull in a closure, but it's probably mostly okay in practice.
