Node Docker Image max_old_space_size

Build Environment
1

Our Angular 7 app has grown and our CircleCI build job is now erroring with:
“FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory”

We’ve upgraded our CircleCI plan and are using: resource_class: large (4 vCPUs 8 RAM)

My understanding is we need to increase the nodejs memory limit. However, it’s unclear what command/syntax we need in our config.yml to accomplish this. This is the relevant part of our config.yaml – but deploys are failing with the same error.

docker:
  - image: circleci/node:9.9-browsers
    environment:
      TOOL_NODE_FLAGS: --max_old_space_size=4096
resource_class: large
2

You may want to try using NODE_OPTIONS. Is TOOL_NODE_FLAGS specific to meteor? If i’m reading things on the interwebs correctly it seems like it might be. NODE_OPTIONS should pass it directly to node. You can refer to https://support.circleci.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009208393-How-can-I-increase-the-max-memory-for-Node-

3

Thank you! It looks like this approach has worked. Will do additional testing and report back with more detail.

1 Like
4

Success! Deployments are now successfully building our Angular 7 app. Here’s a summary of the problem/resolution:

  • Building Angular apps can consume significant memory i.e. > 4GB.
  • CircleCI default docker images have a max of 4GB.
  • We upgraded our CircleCI plan to “Performance”.
  • Upgrading the plan allowed us to increase the size of the docker image. We’re currently using resource_class large (4 vCPUs 8 RAM)… Resource classes are well documented (see link below).
  • The NodeJS default memory limit is low so we also need to configure NodeJS to use more RAM. We chose to increase to 4GB based on Angular posts.
  • The support article above “How can I increase the max memory for Node” explains how to do this. However, it wasn’t clear after reading it a dozen times exactly “how”.
  • Add an environment variable “NODE_OPTIONS” with value “–max_old_space_size=4096” in the CircleCI website app (not in config.yaml). Jobs > Settings (gear icon) > Environment Variables > Add Variable.
  • Unknown if it’s possible to set max_old_space_size in config.yaml. But this would be a much better approach for us because we have many docker images in our config.yaml and we’re forced to bump them all up to resource_class large.

Here’s our final config.yaml snippet:

deploy-production:
    working_directory: ~/tmp
    docker:
      - image: circleci/node:9.9
    resource_class: large
    steps:

https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#jobs

1 Like
5

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