According to nodetime, my memory leak is persisting even through node application restarts. Check out the following "OS - Free Memory" graph; notice how the memory decreases steadily (despite the node app restarting dozens and dozens of times) until I restart the whole server:
How is this possible? Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something? I don't understand how a memory leak in one process could survive and continue to affect the OS...
Machine Info: Amazon EC2 (m1.large) running CentOS
A memory leak in one process (that is actually killed) can't do this.
Are you using 3rd party systems to provided shared state? For example, a database, or something like redis for sessions? In that case, restarting your node process will just lead to reconnecting to the same shared state and continuing whatever leak was started initially.