Node.js apps that run fine in staging can quietly balloon in memory once they hit real production traffic, eventually crashing with OOMKilled errors during peak load. This whitepaper-style guide from Endurance Softwares walks engineering teams through a repeatable way to confirm a genuine memory leak instead of chasing normal workload noise, capture comparable heap snapshots safely, and trace the exact retaining path back to its source. It covers the most common culprits in real Node.js services