bug: NodeJS does not exit after node.stop() is called

[dbu9]

Run

import { createLightNode } from "@waku/sdk";

async function main() {
	
	// Create and start a Light Node
	const node = await createLightNode({ defaultBootstrap: true });
	await node.start();
	console.log("Node started");
	
	// Use the stop() function to stop a running node
	await node.stop();
	await node.libp2p.stop();
	console.log("Stopped");
	
}

main();

Output:

Ignore WebSocket connection failures
Waku tries to discover peers and some of them are expected to fail
Node started
Stopped

[weboko]

Thank you for reporting it @dbu9!

Expected behavior in that case is that NodeJS program should exit once Event loop is empty.
Actual behavior is that js-waku seems to retain some event listeners and/or timers thus preventing NodeJS from exit.

Mitigation I can think of right now is to use process.exit(0); at the end of your script to exit from the process otherwise you can safely assume js-waku is kinda stopped and won't consume a lot of resources even though there are some pending timers / events left.

Things that we need to investigate and potentially re-work:

• centralize scheduling or events and timers within js-waku codebase;
• make sure to dispose them upon waku.stop();
• see if it solves the problem;

[weboko]

Ice boxing for now as js-waku optimizes for Browser and NodeJS is descoped for next period for now.
For NodeJS you can try using nwaku bindings or REST API.