>> What's also interesting is that node crashes after about a minute > I believe this is because `while(1)` runs so fast that there is no "idle" time for V8 to

>> What's also interesting is that node crashes after about a minute > I believe this is because `while(1)` runs so fast that there is no "idle" time for V8 to actually run GC. V8 is a strange beast, and this is just a guess of mine. Not exactly: the GC is still running; it’s live memory that’s growing unbounded. What’s going on here is that WritableStream is non-blocking; it has advisory backpressure, but if you ignore that it will do its best to accept writes anyway and keep them in a buffer until it can actually write them out. Since you’re not giving it any breathing room, that buffer just keeps growing until there’s no more memory left. `process.nextTick()` is presumably slowing things down enough on your system to give it a chance to drain the buffer. (I see there’s some discussion below about this changing by version; I’d guess that’s an artifact of other optimizations and such.) To do this properly, you need to listen to the return value from `.write()` and, if it returns false, back off until the stream drains and there’s room in the buffer again. Here’s the (not particularly optimized) function I use to do that: async function writestream(chunks, stream) { for await (const chunk of chunks) { if (!stream.write(chunk)) { // When write returns null, stream is starting to buffer and we need to wait for it to drain // (otherwise we'll run out of memory!) await new Promise(resolve => stream.once('drain', () => resolve())) } } } I do wish Node made it more obvious what was going on in this situation; this is a very common mistake with streams and it’s easy to not notice until things suddenly go very wrong. ETA: I should probably note that transform streams, `readable.pipe()`, `stream.pipeline()`, and the like all handle this stuff automatically. Here’s a one-liner, though it’s not especially fast: node -e 'const {Readable} = require("stream"); Readable.from(function*(){while(1) yield "1"}()).pipe(process.stdout)' | pv > /dev/null