Hi everyone,
first of all let me tell you n8n is an amazing product and we are making extensive use of it in my company.
Some days ago I was checking the memory usage and I encountered a weird issue: the ftp node and generally speaking, every other node involving the buffer, use a huge and very unusual amount of ram.
In the example workflow down here I simply download a test file (100 MB) and the ram usage peaks at 1.5 GB.
For bigger projects we “fixed” the issue by setting the filesystem as temporary storage, but I was wondering if you could maybe address the issue.
The credential for the FTP connection are public:
- Host: ftp.otenet.gr
- Port: 21
- User: speedtest
- Password: speedtest
We are currently running n8n via Docker at the latest version.
Thank you and keep up the great work!
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Hi @Shockwave, welcome to the community!
Many thanks for sharing these details. By mentioning filesystem as temporary storage, do you mean you’re already setting the N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE=filesystem environment variable (to tell n8n to use the filesystem rather than memory for keeping binary data)? This would keep the memory usage below 500MB when I just tested this.
Hi @MutedJam , thank you for your reply!
Yes, you are correct: in order to solve the issue I set the N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE=filesystem env. Despite this change, I think ~500MB is probably a still preatty high mem usage, and I’m also wondering if there’s a more permanent fix to the original memory leak that occurs when I keep the default parameter and use the ram to store data.
Thank you
I am not aware of any plans to improve memory consumption when working with binary data (beyond the filesystem-based handling) at the moment unfortunately, mut maybe @sirdavidoff can share more details here?