Loop - Javascript heap out of memory

I have a workflow that should loop ± 170 times over the following nodes:
Get HTTP Request Results > Convert Results into desired format > Insert Results into MSSQL Server

The reason that it loops 170 times is that the API only allows me to get 100 records at a time and the data contains about 17.000 records.

The scrips works fine up until repetition nr. 80-85. Then the workflow keeps loading forever:
Screenshot 2021-06-30 at 08.08.15

When I go into my VM to check the status of my Docker container I see that I get fatal errors telling me the JavaScript heap is out of memory.

So I ran the workflow again while monitoring the memory usage using ‘docker stats’.
This is the status at loop nr 85 when the workflow stops working:

As you can see the memory usage is very high, 2+ GB for ‘n8n_n8n_1’, which normally uses around 140 MB idle state.
The database-table takes about 5 MB of space when loaded into SQL Server, so it is not a huge table with lots of values and columns. What could I do to solve this problem?

As n8n converts everything into JSON (and so key → value pairs) will the memory required be much higher than in SQLite.

You can do one of two things:

  • Increase RAM
  • Depending on your workflows and what you are doing you could split up the workflow into two different ones to decrease the memory footprint. One outer one that does not have much data and for example only loops and gives start-index to another sub-workflow which then does the rest of the work.

Btw. if you have a lot of Function-Nodes trying to reduce the number and combining them into a single one could also be helpful as Function-Nodes have to always copy the whole data and increase so the memory footprint a lot.

Also executing a workflow manually (so with UI open) will increase the RAM required.

Thanks Jan, I’ll try fixing it!

You are welcome!

If you run into problems or have questions regarding the exact approach simply post.

I had a same issue with RAM allocation.

I do run n8n locally on Winodows server. Server got 32gb of ram but it uses only 4gb on top. How I can increase it?

I do start n8n through terminal by enetering “npx n8n” I don’t use docker.

Hi @Ivars_Pavlovich, I am sorry you’re having trouble. As a first step, make sure you configure the old space in your Node.js environment: Command-line API | Node.js v21.2.0 Documentation

If you’re still having trouble afterwards, perhaps you can open a new thread and share exactly what you’re doing and which errors you’re seeing?

Thank you!

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