Fatal javascript OOM in GC during deserialization

Question

My hubris and naivety has done something terrible. I'm getting the following error from my Node.js command prompt:

<--- Last few GCs --->


<--- JS stacktrace --->


#
# Fatal javascript OOM in GC during deserialization
#

It will run no programs, even one with one line of code console logging "hello world.". I've restarted the computer, no luck. Some places online have recommended upping the memory limit of node, which I have been unsuccessful in. I don't know why it will run nothing. Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

The last file I was working on was this: How do I shift data using Nodejs and sheetjs to merge xlsx docs? . I had it combining 10 documents and moving 24 pages for each document into 1 large doc. I had paired it down to 2 docs and 1 page for testing purposes and executed the code successfully each time until the crash happened. Still experimenting to get the results I want, just now unable to do anything since the nodejs command prompt is as it is.

Answer 1

My issue was I by mistake installed node(x86) on 64 bit Windows , I should have installed windows(x64).

Answer 2

I got this error after setting environment variable NODE_OPTIONS = --max-old-space-size=4096 in Windows

Any call to npm including npm -v npm install resulted in Fatal javascript OOM in GC during deserialization

Removing the env var and restarting did nothing.

I had to re-install Node and npm. Good luck!