Streams: Is the .on('data', ...) same as .pipe(..., { end: false}) ?

[edin-m]

I have read about streams multiple times and I have tried and made some of my own small streams.

I have created stream of zeroes (with buffers) that are sent over TCP on TCP client's command.
Stream is generated by readable stream.

However if I use:

conn.zeroStream = new ZeroStream(size);
conn.zeroStream.on('data', function(data) { conn.write(data); });

memory usage goes to infinity with OS shutting down the process.

And if I use

conn.zeroStream.pipe(conn, { end: false });

I get no memory performance issues.
Am I misunderstanding streams or is this potentially real memory leak.

https://gist.github.com/edin-m/2c1391e36a0ee6a9c084

[rlidwka]

I suspect that pipe() slows ZeroStream down requesting data only when it's needed. But on('data') callback fires as soon as any data is available. Thus, in case of on('data') you'll get 100mb of zeroes all at once, but with pipe() you'll generate zeroes when previous data is sent over the wire.

I see no memory leak there, just an inefficient use of the memory. It should get freed up when tcp connection is closed.