“Process out of memory” when running Node.js or NPM on Mac OSX 10.5

Question

I am completely new to both Macs and Node.js, so sorry if this one is a bit basic.

I am running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and have just installed the last version of Node.js (released version, not built from source).

Whenever I attempt to run Node or do an NPM install, I get the following error message:

FATAL ERROR: CodeRange::GetNextAllocationBlock Allocation failed - process out of memory

Does anyone know what the problem is? If not, what would be the next steps to figure this out?

Edit: It turns out that if I run these commands a few times then they eventually work. So my work-around is to keep repeating the command until I get success. This is better than nothing but still not acceptable. Software like WebStorm, which needs to execute these tools, doesn't know about this workaround and fails all the time.

Answer 1

The issue seems to show up when running the distributed build of Node on anything pre OSX 10.6.

You can manually build the binary yourself if you don't have the option to upgrade your OS.

http://therobotsbrain.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/installing-nodejs-on-os-x-105.html

Answer 2

I'm running X.5.8, and node 0.10.13 was giving me this error message. I tried some earlier versions of node, and 0.10.3 works while 0.10.4 gets the error message. This is the x86 version, x64 seems to crash at .3 but works at .0. Oh wait, it's more complicated than that. Seems to make a difference when I make a symlink to the app in /usr/local/bin, it crashes. more often. Try a few different ones see which work for you.

I really need to get a new laptop.

download here: http://nodejs.org/dist/