We had a pool of 4 Node instances which is the default of the solution we were using (a patched version of https://github.com/hassox/std_json_io)

Each Node instance has a 1 GB memory limit (the heap? It seems Java like). We failed to find a way to raise it but, again, we didn't invest too much into it except some googling. It seems there used to be a command line option for that but it doesn't work anymore.

Each hit to Node raises the memory usage until it gets to 1 GB and throws an error and gets recycled, which unfortunately translates to a 502/503 to the client. We can intercept those errors in Elixir and try again but it's far from ideal.

To have less errors we naively decided to increase the number of workers but we also had to increase the RAM of the server. The first hit for each client gets served by Node so eventually Node's resource usage dwarfed Elixir's. We felt like we were doing it wrong (I'm sure there is a way to get a saner setup) and decided to turn off server side rendering. Nobody complained and we're saving some $40/50 per month on that single server, plus our time which is worth more than that.

I think that projects with little load should run on low tech uncomplicated solutions: a reverse proxy and an application server were enough in the 90's for the same scenario and are still OK now.