Does console.log leak?

[tolmasky]

So, if I run the following program:

while (true)
    console.log("hello... there");

Within approximately 3 minutes or so node is consuming 1.5GB of memory. The behavior is of course saner if I pipe to /dev/null.

However, if I run the following program:

def hello():
    while True:
        print "hello world..."

hello()

Python stays at 3.3MB forever.

The reason I bring this up is that in our tests, we seem to have to be careful how often we log, since it seems to dramatically influence the memory consumption (and thus make memory tests untrustworthy).

This is in basically all versions of node (the above is 5.2, but were experiencing similar, perhaps worse, behavior in node 4 / 12/ 10 etc).

[fivdi]

No, it's not a leak. Everything is ok. See #2970 and #1741 for further info.

[cjihrig]

This is a known issue. You can read more in #3171 and #1741.

[abhinavsingi]

From #2970 (comment)

Short answer: console output is buffered and async. Your console is slower then the script, and the buffer isn't limited by anything except for the global memory limit. So, it fills up the buffer and dies.
More info at #1741.