Memory leaks in JavaScript don't announce themselves with an error. They show up as a heap that grows by 20MB per minute — invisible in a five-minute Lighthouse run, fatal in a six-hour production session. Why React apps leak: A useEffect that opens a WebSocket and never closes it on unmount. A setInterval without clearInterval in the cleanup return. A global Map that grows without bound. In each
My Hugo blog was downloading 3.6 MB of JavaScript and 40 KB of external CSS on every page load. For a static blog with mostly text and a few diagrams, that was absurd. Here is how I fixed it. HTML: 86 KB JavaScript: 3.6 MB (Mermaid + KaTeX) CSS: 40 KB (KaTeX stylesheets) Problem: render-blocking scripts loaded on every page for math and diagrams Adding minifyOutput = true to hugo.toml shrunk HTML
Random 30–50ms freezes with no obvious long tasks in the Performance panel often have one root cause: the garbage collector. V8 pauses JavaScript execution to reclaim memory, and if your allocation rate is high enough, those pauses happen frequently — creating jank that shows up as a sawtooth pattern in the memory timeline rather than a spike in the flame chart. What this covers: How V8's generati