Lower buffer.constants.MAX_STRING_LENGTH in 14.4.0

[RickGroenewegen]

• Version: 14.4.0
• Platform: Ubuntu & Mac
• Subsystem: N/A

What steps will reproduce the bug?

I upgraded from 12.18.1 to 14.4.0 and noticed the maximum string length (MAX_STRING_LENGTH) decreasing from 1073741799 to 536870888. Seems like a regression described in: #31653

My architecture is a 64-bit build which I've checked with 'node -p "process.arch"'

v.12.18.1

require('buffer').constants.MAX_STRING_LENGTH; // =1073741799

v.14.4.0

require('buffer').constants.MAX_STRING_LENGTH; // = 536870888

[addaleax]

This is coming from an upstream change in V8, as a side effect of them modifying their code to enable pointer compression (even though the default Node.js build does not use pointer compression). I don’t think there’s anything in particular that we can do about it on the Node.js side.

[addaleax]

I’ll close this given that there doesn’t seem to be anything that we can do about this, sorry.

Seems like a regression described in: #31653

My understanding is that V8 accidentally lowered the value more than they intended to (from ~1 GB to ~256 MB instead of ~512 MB), but that the new limit of 512 MB is what we have to live with now.