I'm running Node.js / Express server on a container with pretty strict memory constraints.
One of the endpoints I'd like to expose is a "batch" endpoint where a client can request a list of data objects in bulk from my data store. The individual objects vary in size, so it's difficult to set a hard limit on how many objects can be requested at one time. In most cases a client could request a large amount of objects without any issues, but it certain edge cases even requests for a small amount of objects will trigger an OOM error.
I'm familiar with Node's process.memoryUsage() & process.memoryUsage.rss(), but I'm worried about the performance implications of constantly checking heap (or service) memory usage while serving an individual batch request.
In the longer term, I might consider using memory monitoring to bake in some automatic pagination for the endpoint. In the short term, however, I'd just like to be able to return an informative error to the client in the event that they are requesting too many data objects at a given time (rather than have the entire application crash with an OOM error).
Are there any more effective methods or tools I could be using to solve the problem instead?