Memory leak using node-serialport library on pi zero w

Question

Ok, I'm scratching my head here. I am playing with the node-serialport library and when I run this script, the memory is eaten up at a rate of 2MB per second:

var SerialPort = require('serialport');
var port = new SerialPort('/dev/ttyAMA0', {
  baudRate: 115200
});


// Switches the port into "flowing mode"
port.on('data', function (data) {
  console.log('Data:', data.toString() );
});

I don't even have anything connected to the serial port and it just starts eating ram. The weird thing is that I don't have this problem on a raspberry pi zero (without the wifi). The node versions are the same, the node-serialport versions are the same, they are both on the same version of Raspbian. I'm at a loss as to where to go next.

Details:

root@raspberrypi:# node -v
v6.11.4 
root@raspberrypi:# grep serialport package.json 
    "serialport": "^6.2.0",
root@raspberrypi:~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Raspbian
Description:    Raspbian GNU/Linux 9.3 (stretch)
Release:    9.3
Codename:   stretch
root@raspberrypi:~# cat /boot/cmdline.txt
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=74121984-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet splash

I thought it might be this issue but after upgrading to 6.2.0 the issue still persists and now I'm out of ideas. :(

Answer 1

Find another library. node-serialport seems to leak memory like a sieve!

You may wish to have a look at this library instead.

Answer 2

As it turns out, the bluetooth uses the same serial port, so they were likely fighting.

From the github issue I opened:

If Bluetooth is not needed, add dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt to /boot/config.txt and reboot. Now full UART /dev/ttyAMA0 is usable on GPIO14 and 15.