Reinstalling all plugins very resource hungry

[tkurki]

I tried to reinstall all my plugins on my PRi3 by removing .signalk/node_modules and simply running npm install in .signalk.

This turned out to be problematic in two ways:

• my docker compose based setup has a mem limit of 350m that OOM killed npm install when it exceeded the limit
• without the memory limit the install would still stall, halting the whole RPi or at least stopping the ssh connection i was using and no longer responding to ssh over Zerotier

pstree showed a number of npm install processes and I think i saw node-pre-gyp in top also.

Doing the same operation manually, one by one (under docker run -it --rm -v /home/pi/signalk-settings:/home/node/.signalk --entrypoint /bin/sh signalk/signalk-server:master) succeeded without breaking a sweat.

To me this suggests that just given a package.json npm install goes all out, with parallel operations, which may be just too resource intensive for some typical platforms that Signal K is used on.

I can think of two solutions here:

• a separate sk-reinstall-plugins script that renames node_modules and package.json and then loops over the plugins there, installing them one by one
• a way to launch sk server with a command line option --reinstall-plugins that does the same thing as the script. this would support also Windows platform

[KEGustafsson]

npm config get maxsockets default is 15. If this is tuned, would it make any difference e.g. npm config set maxsockets 5 or even smaller amount?

Also npm i --max-old-space-size=250 might be viable solution to limit memory usage.