What causes production Node.js outages?
Production outages can result from many factors, including event-loop blocking, memory leaks, CPU saturation, database failures, connection-pool exhaustion, unbounded retries, dependency failures, traffic spikes, incorrect deployments, configuration mistakes, expired credentials, insufficient resource limits, and missing observability. Strong production engineering focuses on preventing these issues and detecting them quickly through monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, alerts, testing, and safe deployment practices.
Key Takeaways
- Production failures usually have multiple possible causes.
- Monitor CPU, memory, event-loop latency, database health, and dependencies.
- Use timeouts, rate limits, retries, and circuit breakers carefully.
- Strong observability reduces incident-detection time.
Knowledge Check
Which can cause a Node.js production outage?