title: How to request the Garbage Collector in node.js to run?
body: <p>At startup, it seems my node.js app uses around 200MB of memory. If I leave it alone for a while, it shrinks to around 9MB.</p>
  
  <p>Is it possible from within the app to:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Check how much memory the app is using ?</li>
  <li>Request the garbage collector to run ?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The reason I ask is, I load a number of files from disk, which are processed temporarily. This probably causes the memory usage to spike. But I don't want to load more files until the GC runs, otherwise there is the risk that I will run out of memory.</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions ?</p>