I do understand that today designs tend to put less emphasis on conservative memory usage but that’s pretty outrageous. A simple search into node’s package manager ate one gigabyte and half of main memory having to deal with a simple question like
npm find foobar
more speficically GNU time told me that it took 48 seconds and 1799Mb of resident memory to scan thorugh a local list of the 169.312 total packages available from npmjs.com.
Apt, the almighty Debian package manager consumed a mere 99 MegaBytes to search into package names and descriptions throught more than an hundred thousands packages (107819) which are usually far beefier that javascript modules.
That’s more than eighteen times.
Javascript, your librarian is obese.