Your typical Node instance is using an order of magnitude less memory than the beastly JVM. We use Java microservices with Spring at my job and each "micro" service consumes close to 1GB of memory. I've never written a Node service that had more than 100MB footprint.
The default maximum heap size for the JVM on systems with 4GB or more of RAM is one gigabyte. Has this been changed in your microservices' startup parameters? If not, it is no surprise that Java uses the memory that you have allocated to it before garbage collecting.
The JVM has the same global heap problem as Node... it's frustrating that with all the development that goes into the JVM this problem remains unaddressed.
