FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory on Digital OceanDroplet

Introduction

A memory Heap error occurred on Digital ocean droplet while trying to build a react app during deployment. I do development primarily in Django and front end using ReactJs. During deployment, I have to do the final build for React to produce a compiled static file that can be served by Django. The memory error occurred during the build when running yarn build

<--- Last few GCs --->

[139947:0x6613440]    32615 ms: Mark-Compact 244.4 (258.4) -> 243.5 (258.6) MB, 858.51 / 0.00 ms  (average mu = 0.116, current mu = 0.034) allocation failure; scavenge might not succeed
[139947:0x6613440]    33392 ms: Mark-Compact 244.6 (258.6) -> 243.7 (258.9) MB, 711.03 / 0.00 ms  (average mu = 0.101, current mu = 0.085) allocation failure; scavenge might not succeed


<--- JS stacktrace --->

FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory
----- Native stack trace -----

 1: 0xb86ecf node::OOMErrorHandler(char const*, v8::OOMDetails const&) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 2: 0xef74d0 v8::Utils::ReportOOMFailure(v8::internal::Isolate*, char const*, v8::OOMDetails const&) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 3: 0xef77b7 v8::internal::V8::FatalProcessOutOfMemory(v8::internal::Isolate*, char const*, v8::OOMDetails const&) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 4: 0x1109355  [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 5: 0x11098e4 v8::internal::Heap::RecomputeLimits(v8::internal::GarbageCollector) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 6: 0x11207d4 v8::internal::Heap::PerformGarbageCollection(v8::internal::GarbageCollector, v8::internal::GarbageCollectionReason, char const*) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 7: 0x1120fec v8::internal::Heap::CollectGarbage(v8::internal::AllocationSpace, v8::internal::GarbageCollectionReason, v8::GCCallbackFlags) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 8: 0x10f72f1 v8::internal::HeapAllocator::AllocateRawWithLightRetrySlowPath(int, v8::internal::AllocationType, v8::internal::AllocationOrigin, v8::internal::AllocationAlignment) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
 9: 0x10f8485 v8::internal::HeapAllocator::AllocateRawWithRetryOrFailSlowPath(int, v8::internal::AllocationType, v8::internal::AllocationOrigin, v8::internal::AllocationAlignment) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
10: 0x10d5ad6 v8::internal::Factory::NewFillerObject(int, v8::internal::AllocationAlignment, v8::internal::AllocationType, v8::internal::AllocationOrigin) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
11: 0x1531906 v8::internal::Runtime_AllocateInYoungGeneration(int, unsigned long*, v8::internal::Isolate*) [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
12: 0x196aef6  [/home/aislackbot/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/node]
error Command failed with exit code 1.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.

Build error

Creating an optimized production build...
The build failed because the process exited too early. This probably means the system ran out of memory or someone called kill -9 on the process.
error Command failed with exit code 1.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.
yarn run v1.22.22
$ react-scripts build
Creating an optimized production build...
The build failed because the process exited too early. This probably means the system ran out of memory or someone called kill -9 on the process.
error Command failed with exit code 1.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.

Resolution

The above error is as a result of the Node.js installation having the heap memory restricted. While executing the build process, this heap memory restriction is exceeded.

Thankfully this value can be adjusted through NODE_OPTIONS and be exported to the linux system where Node.js is installed.

In my case I adjusted the value to 4096 with the following command:

export NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=4096"

Running yarn build then works afterwords

export NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=4096"
yarn build

--max-old-space-size Sets the max memory size of V8's old memory section. According to NodeJs documentation:

As memory consumption approaches the limit, V8 will spend more time on garbage collection in an effort to free unused memory.

research

NodeJs Documentation Reference
About --max-old-space-size=SIZE in node-options