Generates a snapshot of the current V8 heap and writes it to a JSON file. This file is intended to be used with tools such as Chrome DevTools. The JSON schema is undocumented and specific to the V8 engine, and may change from one version of V8 to the next.

A heap snapshot is specific to a single V8 isolate. When using worker threads, a heap snapshot generated from the main thread will not contain any information about the workers, and vice versa.

Creating a heap snapshot requires memory about twice the size of the heap at the time the snapshot is created. This results in the risk of OOM killers terminating the process.

Generating a snapshot is a synchronous operation which blocks the event loop for a duration depending on the heap size.

import { writeHeapSnapshot } from 'node:v8';
import {
  Worker,
  isMainThread,
  parentPort,
} from 'node:worker_threads';

if (isMainThread) {
  const worker = new Worker(__filename);

  worker.once('message', (filename) => {
    console.log(`worker heapdump: ${filename}`);
    // Now get a heapdump for the main thread.
    console.log(`main thread heapdump: ${writeHeapSnapshot()}`);
  });

  // Tell the worker to create a heapdump.
  worker.postMessage('heapdump');
} else {
  parentPort.once('message', (message) => {
    if (message === 'heapdump') {
      // Generate a heapdump for the worker
      // and return the filename to the parent.
      parentPort.postMessage(writeHeapSnapshot());
    }
  });
}