Your Node is Leaking Memory? setTimeout Could be the Reason

written on June 05, 2024

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:

const token = setTimeout(() => {}, 100);
clearTimeout(token);

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:

> setTimeout(() => {})
Timeout {
  _idleTimeout: 1,
  _idlePrev: [TimersList],
  _idleNext: [TimersList],
  _idleStart: 4312,
  _onTimeout: [Function (anonymous)],
  _timerArgs: undefined,
  _repeat: null,
  _destroyed: false,
  [Symbol(refed)]: true,
  [Symbol(kHasPrimitive)]: false,
  [Symbol(asyncId)]: 78,
  [Symbol(triggerId)]: 6
}

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:

class MyThing {
  constructor() {
    this.timeout = setTimeout(() => { ... }, INTERVAL);
  }

  clearTimeout() {
    clearTimeout(this.timeout);
  }
}

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.

However the timeout object can act as a container for more state which is not quite as obvious. Annew API that has been added over the last couple of years called AsyncLocalStorage which is getting some traction is attaching additional state onto all timeouts that fire. Async locals storage is implemented in a way that timeouts (and promises and similar constructs) carry forward hidden state until they run:

const { AsyncLocalStorage } = require('node:async_hooks');
const als = new AsyncLocalStorage();

let t;
als.run([...Array(10000)], () => {
  t = setTimeout(() => {
    //
    const theArray = als.getStore();
    assert(theArray.length === 10000);
  }, 100);
});

console.log(t);

When you run this, you will notice that the Timeout holds a reference to this large array:

Timeout {
  _idleTimeout: 100,
  _idlePrev: [TimersList],
  _idleNext: [TimersList],
  _idleStart: 10,
  _onTimeout: [Function (anonymous)],
  _timerArgs: undefined,
  _repeat: null,
  _destroyed: false,
  [Symbol(refed)]: true,
  [Symbol(kHasPrimitive)]: false,
  [Symbol(asyncId)]: 2,
  [Symbol(triggerId)]: 1,
  [Symbol(kResourceStore)]: [Array] // reference to that large array is held here
}

That's because every single async local storage that is created registers itself with the timeout with a custom Symbol(kResourceStore) which even remains on there after a timeout has been cleared or the timeout ran to completion. This means that the more async local storage you use, the more “stuff” you hold on if you don't clear our the timeouts.

The fix seems obvious: rather than holding on to timeouts, hold on to the underlying ID. That's because you can convert a Timeout into a primitive (with for instance the unary + operator). The primitive is just a number like it would be in the browser which then can also be used for clearing. Since a number holds no reference, this should resolve the issue:

class MyThing {
  constructor() {
    // the + operator forces the timeout to be converted into a number
    this.timeout = +setTimeout(() => { ... }, INTERVAL);
  }

  clearTimeout() {
    // clearTimeout and other functions can resolve numbers back into
    // under internal timeout object
    clearTimeout(this.timeout);
  }
}

Except it doesn't (today). In fact today doing this will cause an unrecoverable memory leak because of a bug in node ². Once that will be resolved however that should be a fine way to avoid problem.

const kHasPrimitive = Reflect
  .ownKeys(setInterval(() => {}))
  .find((x) => x.toString() === 'Symbol(kHasPrimitive)');

function invokeSafe(t, callable) {
  try {
    return callable();
  } finally {
    if (t[kHasPrimitive]) {
      clearTimeout(t);
    }
  }
}

const originalSetTimeout = global.setTimeout;
global.setTimeout = (callable, ...rest) => {
  const t = originalSetTimeout(() => invokeSafe(t, callable), ...rest);
  return t;
};

const originalSetInterval = global.setInterval;
global.setInterval = (callable, ...rest) => {
  const t = originalSetInterval(() => invokeSafe(t, callable), ...rest);
  return t;
};

class MyThing {
  constructor() {
    this.timeout = setTimeout(() => {
      this.timeout = null;
      ...
    }, INTERVAL);
  }

  clearTimeout() {
    if (this.timeout) {
      clearTimeout(this.timeout);
      this.timeout = null;
    }
  }
}

How problematic are timeouts? It's hard for me to say, but there are a lot of places where code holds on to timeouts and intervals in node for longer than is healthy. If you are trying to make things such as hot code reloading work, you are working with long lasting or recurring timeouts it might be very easy to run into this problem. Due to how widespread these timeouts are and the increased use of async local storage I can only assume that this will become a more common issue people run into. It's also a bit devious because you might not even know that you use async local storage as a user.

We're not the first to run into issues like this. For instance Next.js is trying to work around related issues by periodically patching setTimeout and setInterval to forcefully clearning out intervals to avoid memory leakage in the dev server. (Which unfortunately sometimes runs into the node bug mentioned above due to it's own use of toPrimitive)

How widespread is async local storage? It depends a bit on what you do. For instance we (and probably all players in the observability space including the OpenTelemetry project itself) use it to track tracing information with the local flow of execution. Modern JavaScript frameworks also sometimes are quite active users of async local storage. In the particular case we were debugging earlier today a total of 7 async local storages were attached to the timeouts we found in the heap dumps, some of which held on to massive react component trees.

Async local storage is great: I'm a huge proponent of it! If you have ever used Flask you will realize that Flask is built on a similar concept (thread locals, nowadays context vars) to give you access to the right request object. What however makes async local storage a bit scary is that it's very easy to hold on to memory accidentally. In node's case particularly easy with timeouts.

At the very least for timeouts in node there might be a simple improvement by no longer exposing the internal Timeout object. Node could in theory return a lightweight proxy object that breaks the cycle after the timeout has been executed or cleared. How backwards compatible this can be done I don't know however.

For improving async local storage longer term I think the ecosystem might have to embrace the idea about shedding contextual state. It's incredibly easy to leak async local storage today if you spawn "background" operations that last. For instance today a console.log will on first use allocate an internal TTY resource which accidentally holds on to the calling async local storage of completely unrelated stuff. Whenever a thing such as console.log wants to create a long lasting resource until the end of the program, helper APIs could be provided that automatically prevent all async local storage from propagating. Today there is only a way to prevent a specific local storage from propagating by disabling it, but that requires knowing which ones exist.

This entry was tagged javascript