Diagnoses and resolves memory leaks in JavaScript/Node.js applications. Use when a user reports high memory usage, OOM errors, or wants to analyze heapsnapshots or run memory leak detection tools like memlab.
This skill provides expert guidance and workflows for finding, diagnosing, and fixing memory leaks in JavaScript and Node.js applications.
memlab: Do NOT attempt to read raw .heapsnapshot files directly, as they are extremely large and will consume too many tokens. Always recommend and use memlab to process snapshots and identify leak traces.When investigating a frontend web application memory leak, utilize the chrome-devtools-mcp tools to interact with the application and take snapshots.
click, navigate_page, fill, etc., to manipulate the page into the desired state.take_memory_snapshot to save .heapsnapshot files to disk at baseline, target (after actions), and final (after reverting actions) states.Once you have generated .heapsnapshot files using take_memory_snapshot, use memlab to automatically find memory leaks.
memlab to analyze the generated heapsnapshots..heapsnapshot files using read_file or cat.When you have found a leak trace (e.g., via memlab output), you must identify the root cause in the code.
If memlab is not available, you MUST use the fallback script in the references directory to compare two .heapsnapshot files and identify the top growing objects and common leak types.
Run the script using Node.js:
node skills/memory-leak-debugging/references/compare_snapshots.js <baseline.heapsnapshot> <target.heapsnapshot>
The script will analyze and output the top growing objects by size and highlight the 3 most common types of memory leaks (e.g., Detached DOM nodes, closures, Contexts) if they are present.