If you're having memory leaks/bloating

Try running your sharp image processing in a child_process spawn. I’ve seen lots of posts here that generally conclude it’s something node-related with RSS memory. I can’t say one way or another if this is the case, and I’ve generally seen multiple suggestions to fix it in my search for a solution, some seem to work, others don’t - this worked for me.

In my case running sharp in a server/express is where I saw the bloat. I’m using multer to upload image files and then attempting to compress/reduce them on the fly. Since multer stores the images and spits out an array of file locations, I just passed the array into my child process as a JSON string param.

// express route
var multer = require('multer');
var upload = multer({dest:'uploads/tmp'});
app.post(['/upload/:store/:name', '/form/upload/:store/:name'], upload.array('images', 6), function(req, res){
    var manifest = {shop: req.params.store, name: req.params.name, images: req.files};

    // Spawn node child process to handle image manipulation

    var spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

    var compressor = spawn('node', ['./modules/compression', JSON.stringify(manifest)]);
     
    // When the child process handles the images successfully it will emit the array of image locations for us to send to the front end.
    compressor.stdout.on('data', (data)=>{

      data = JSON.parse(data.toString());
      res.json(data);

    });
    // If there's an error, we'll see it.
    compressor.stderr.on('data', (err)=>{

      console.log(err.toString());
      res.status(500).send();

    });

 });

…My image processing module spawned in the child process…

var fs = require('fs');
var mkdirp = require('mkdirp');
var image = require('./images');

var manifest = JSON.parse(process.argv[2]);
var promises = [];

// Generate promise array loaded with image handling promises
manifest.images.forEach(function(cur){

    promises.push(image.adjustImage(cur));

});

// Iterate through all the promises for the uploaded images, then execute code when done.
Promise.all(promises).then((paths)=>{
    var dir = `./uploads/${manifest.shop}/${manifest.name}`;
    
    // If destination path does not exist, make it so.
    if (!fs.existsSync(dir)) {

        mkdirp.sync(dir, {mode:0777});

    }
    // Delete old image files in destination folder
    oldfiles = fs.readdirSync(dir);

    oldfiles.forEach(function(cur){

        fs.unlinkSync(`${dir}/${cur}`);
        
    });

    // For each of the newly uploaded image files, move them to the destination folder.
    paths.forEach(function(cur){
        fileName = cur.split('/').pop();
        fs.renameSync(`./${cur}`, `${dir}/${fileName}`);

    });

    // Send array of image files to front end.
    var newPaths = fs.readdir(dir, function(err, files){

        files = files.map(function(cur){

            return `${dir}/${cur}`.slice(1);

        });
        process.stdout.write(JSON.stringify(files));
        process.exit();

    });

}).catch(function(err){
    
    console.log(err);
    process.exit(1);
    

});

…The image.js module where the sharp code and promise chain is constructed. Pardon the many files, this all needs refactoring.

var sharp = require('sharp');
var imageSize = require('image-size');
var fs = require('fs'); 

function renameImage(img) {

  function pruneExtension (name) {

    var ext = name.split('.');
    ext = ext[ext.length - 1];
    return `.${ext}`;

  }
  img.extension = pruneExtension(img.originalname);
  img.oldPath = img.path;
  img.newPath = `${img.oldPath}${img.extension}`;
  fs.renameSync(img.oldPath, img.newPath);

}

module.exports = {

  adjustImage: function(img){
    renameImage(img);
    
    return new Promise(function(resolve, reject){

      var size = imageSize(img.newPath);
      if (size.width < 1000) {
    
        resolve(img.newPath);
    
      } else {
        
        sharp(img.newPath).resize(1000, null).jpeg({
          quality: 40
        }).toFile(`${img.oldPath}-sharp.jpg`, (err, output) => {

          if (err) {

            reject(err);

          } else {

            fs.unlinkSync(`${img.oldPath}${img.extension}`);
            img.newPath = `${img.oldPath}-sharp.jpg`;
            img.extension ='.jpg';
            resolve(img.newPath);

          }

        });

      }


    });
  }

};

Hope this concept helps people who are stuck on memory problems. Sharp is amazing, lets keep using it!

[webcarrot]

Other way is use jemalloc by setting LD_PRELOAD environment variable.

Debian example: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjemalloc.so.1 node ...

After this change, total memory usage has dropped from “out off memory” to less than 200M per server instance.

[shwao]

If someone has problems with using libjemalloc1 on debian 10 (buster), its now version 2. Eg. /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjemalloc.so.2