Strange Memory Leak + High CPU Usage in Production Build (But Not in Dev) !! Anyone Seen This Before?

[my-project-world]

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I’m dealing with a really confusing issue and I’m hoping someone here has run into something similar.

I have a React + Node.js app running on a production environment (PM2 + Nginx). Everything works perfectly in development, but after deploying the production build, I get:

• Node server CPU jumps to 90–100% after ~3–5 minutes
• Memory usage increases steadily until it hits almost 1.5GB
• The API response times slowly degrade (from 80ms → 3–5 seconds)
• Eventually the server crashes or PM2 restarts it
  Stack : React 18,Vite, Node.js (Express), PM2, Nginx reverse proxy, Redis (session store + caching)

I think the production React build might be triggering an unintended infinite re-render loop only in the deployed environment, maybe due to environment variables or server misconfiguration — but I cannot reproduce it locally.

At this point, I’m stuck.

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[Manzi-Elvis]

Possible Root Cause: Mismatch Between Frontend BASE_URL and Server Proxy → Infinite Fetch Loop in Production Only

Hey, I’ve actually seen a nearly identical issue before, and based on your description, there’s a strong chance this has nothing to do with React or PM2 directly — it’s likely coming from a silent infinite network loop caused by an environment mismatch between your frontend build and server proxy.
To fix it:

1. Fix Nginx
2. Fix frontend env
3. Rebuild and redeploy

Your symptoms match it almost perfectly