Forcing Garbage Collection with Node.js and V8

I'm in the middle of looking for some memory leaks at the moment, in order to isolate them I wanted to confirm exactly how much memory was being used by a given line of code after garbage collection.

Fortunately V8 allows you to manually force garbage collection from within Javascript.

When you run your node script just add the option: '--expose-gc'

e.g:

node --expose-gc test.js

And then from within the Javascript just do:

global.gc();  

That's it, good luck finding those leaks!