Engineering Blog

Engineering: V8 Garbage Collection in Infinite Streams

Overcoming massive memory leaks originating from continuously mutated long strings.

String Immutability Overhead

In JavaScript (V8), strings are immutable. Concatening a large conversation (`chatHistory += newChunk`) generates a completely new memory blob, leaving the previous string to the Garbage Collector.

Shattering the Heap

When streaming an infinitely long story iteratively, string concatenation triggers major GC pauses roughly every few seconds. We combat this by utilizing array buffering (`[...historyChunks, newChunk].join('')`) and isolating DOM renders, preserving V8 heap stability natively.