Heads up: fs.createWriteStream will cause a memory leak

Author: krystianfowlerCreated May 24, 2024Updated Jan 27, 2025
  • Operating System: NixOS 23.11 (Tapir)
  • **Node.js version:**v20.9.0
  • **fs-extra version:**11.2.0

I have encountered a memory leak that happens when calling fs.createWriteStream from node-fs-extra. Since fs-extra calls gracefu-fs directly for this method I have reported the issue here on the graceful-fs repo: https://github.com/isaacs/node-graceful-fs/issues/248

Since the leak is in graceful-fs I'm adding an issue here mainly as a heads up to anyone looking for a possible cause of their production memory leaks.

The issue is easily solvable by replacing fs-extra calls to createWriteStream with the native node one from node:fs.

Source: jprichardson/node-fs-extra