Not able to get right Sheets from huge xlsx files — using NodeJS XLSX library

Question

I'm trying to get the data from a huge file (800k rows) and put it into database via lambda (AWS). To do that I'm getting the xlsx file from S3 as a buffer and reading it.

module.exports.getSalesData = new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
  getFileFromS3(filename)
    .then(function (workbook) {
      console.log(workbook.SheetNames[1]); // 'sales'
      console.log(workbook.SheetNames); // showing sales as [ 'main', 'sales', 'Sheet1' ]
      console.log(Array.isArray(workbook.SheetNames)); // true
      console.log(typeof workbook.SheetNames); // Object
      console.log(Object.keys(workbook.Sheets)); // [ 'main', 'Sheet1' ] == why 'sales' is not here?

      var sheet_name = workbook.SheetNames[1]; // sales tab
      var json_sheet = XLSX.utils.sheet_to_json(workbook.Sheets[sheet_name], { raw: true })
      resolve(json_sheet)
    })
    .catch(err => {
      console.log('File: ' + filename + ' doesn\'t exists on S3 or you\'re not connected to the internet.');
    })
})

The issue is that for workbook.Sheets I should see [ 'main', 'sales', 'Sheet1' ] , right?

Then I try to get the number of rows (already converted to JSON) like this:

getSalesData.then(function (data) {
    console.log(data.length + ' rows');
    console.log(data[0]);
  }).catch(err => console.error(err));

Where the parameter data is the json_sheet defined in the function above. So for data.length (number of rows) I get 0 instead of 800k+. And, of course, I'm unable to get data[0] which is undefined .

PS.: the file has 57.3mb -- Not sure if it's the cause.

Thanks in advance for help.

Answer 1

So basically what was happening is that NodeJS wasn't able to read the full file because it crashes the NodeJS VM memory limit for strings.

So what I had to do is to increase the memory limit like this:

node --max-old-space-size=2048 services/process/process-sales.js

Which will increase from 512MB to 2048MB / 2GB of memory for NodeJS.

But this is just a solution to read large amount of values.

I don't recommend using NodeJS to threat large amount of data like this. Instead go with Python using some library like Pandas which is awesome to do it.

PS.: Just my opinion and experience by dealing with data using nodejs. I don't think nodejs was made for it.