Chapter 4. Managing Memory and Space

Today's developer has easy access to surprisingly inexpensive storage solutions. The movement away from monolithic systems toward composed and distributed ones has certain advantages, yet inevitably introduces a few new problems. The availability of cheap storage should not be an excuse to push everything you can into memory or onto a disk without any limit, for instance. Also, where does the state reside in such a system? Does a cluster of servers share a common database connection? How is data synchronized in such a setup? If you are using a shared-nothing noSQL architecture, how are state changes communicated across all actors?

There are many considerations. Always seeking to use a minimum of resources is a good guiding principle. In this chapter, we will look at ways to reduce the cost of data storage in your Node programs, including tips on writing efficient, optimized code. Certain strategies for efficiently sharing data across distributed...