You may encounter an error such as the following while running one of the Snyk CLI commands:
FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory
FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory
This generally occurs on larger projects where the default amount of memory allocated by Node (1.5gb) is insufficient to complete the command successfully.
Resolution
You can increase the amount of memory allocated to the command by running the following command prior to running the Snyk CLI:
Linux/macOS
export NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192
For example:
export NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192
snyk test
export NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192
snyk monitor
Windows
From the control panel go to System -> Advanced system settings -> Environment Variables -> New (user or system) and increase the Variable value as shown in the following screenshot:
Or do this in powershell with the following:
$env:NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=8192"
You can also increase the number, if necessary. Some users have increased this up to 14gb for some larger projects.
Snyk Container
Additionally, for Snyk CLI version 1.1090.0 and above, you can exclude the scanning of app layers by using the --exclude-app-vulns option with snyk
container test. You can also opt out of jar scanning using --nest-jar-depth=0. We advise using multi-stage builds so that each layer can be tested as far left as possible, as mentioned in our 5 Best Practices for Container Security