Other links relating to debugging memory related issues in NodeJS which I have bookmarked (in no particular order):

* http://www.willvillanueva.com/the-node-js-profiling-guide-th...

* https://github.com/felixge/node-memory-leak-tutorial

* https://strongloop.com/strongblog/node-js-performance-tip-of...

* https://github.com/bnoordhuis/node-heapdump

* http://www.nearform.com/nodecrunch/self-detect-memory-leak-n...

Some great lessons in this post:

* open()/close() (in other words: resource management) are as likely to cause leaks as malloc()/free() (aka memory management)

* Single threaded code can have race conditions

* No single tool (debugger, heap profiler, logging, etc) will be a panacea for troubleshooting production

Great post- thanks for the writeup!

I would love to see a post detailing some best practices, or even comprehensive setup guides, for instrumenting a full Node.js service. So far most of the information I've seen is very limited in scope and specific to just one aspect of the bigger picture.