Vue CLI's type checking service ignores memory limits

Question

DevOps has requested that we limit our frontend builds to ~1GB of RAM, so that our Jenkins instance doesn't shut down. We use a standard @vue/cli project, with TypeScript. However, the TS type checking service ignores all attempts to limit its memory usage, which is always 2048 MB.

I've tried disabling it and relying on fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin but that introduces other problems.

Based on what I found, this should work:

$ NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=1024 \
    NODE_ENV=production \
    node \
    --max_old_space_size=1024 \
    --max-old-space-size=1024 \
    node_modules/.bin/vue-cli-service build

Note that I've no idea how these memory limits work, as I have limited awareness of Node's internals. But despite these, the type checking service always starts with a 2048 MB limit.

I'm not sure if it's a problem specific to how Vue CLI configures Webpack/TS.

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue (although in my case, I wanted to raise the memory limit instead of lower it). I was able to modify the configuration of the ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin by customizing Vue CLI's built-in webpack.config:

// in vue.config.js

const ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin = require('fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin');

module.exports = {
  configureWebpack: config => {

    // get a reference to the existing ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin
    const existingForkTsChecker = config.plugins.filter(
      p => p instanceof ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin,
    )[0];

    // remove the existing ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin
    // so that we can replace it with our modified version
    config.plugins = config.plugins.filter(
      p => !(p instanceof ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin),
    );

    // copy the options from the original ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin
    // instance and add the memoryLimit property
    const forkTsCheckerOptions = existingForkTsChecker.options;
    forkTsCheckerOptions.memoryLimit = 8192;

    config.plugins.push(new ForkTsCheckerWebpackPlugin(forkTsCheckerOptions));
  },
};

Now when I run my build, I see this in my output:

-  Building for production...
Starting type checking service...
Using 1 worker with 8192MB memory limit

More info on the configureWebpack option here: https://cli.vuejs.org/config/#configurewebpack

To see the default Webpack configuration used by the Vue CLI, you can inspect it by running vue inspect: https://cli.vuejs.org/guide/webpack.html#inspecting-the-project-s-webpack-config