MacOS Catalina freezing+crashing after running Node.JS load test script - node.js

Question

I wrote up a simple load testing script that runs N number of hits to and HTTP endpoint over M async parallel lanes. Each lane waits for the previous request to finish before starting a new request. The script, for my specific use-case, is randomly picking a numeric "width" parameter to add to the URL each time. The endpoint returns between 200k and 900k of image data on each request depending on the width parameter. But my script does not care about this data and simply relies on garbage collection to clean it up.
const fetch = require('node-fetch');
const MIN_WIDTH = 200;
const MAX_WIDTH = 1600;
const loadTestUrl = `
http://load-testing-server.com/endpoint?width={width}
`.trim();
async function fetchAll(url) {
const res = await fetch(url, {
method: 'GET'
});
if (!res.ok) {
throw new Error(res.statusText);
}
}
async function doSingleRun(runs, id) {
const runStart = Date.now();
console.log(`(id = ${id}) - Running ${runs} times...`);
for (let i = 0; i < runs; i++) {
const start = Date.now();
const width = Math.floor(Math.random() * (MAX_WIDTH - MIN_WIDTH)) + MIN_WIDTH;
try {
const result = await fetchAll(loadTestUrl.replace('{width}', `${width}`));
const duration = Date.now() - start;
console.log(`(id = ${id}) - Width ${width} Success. ${i+1}/${runs}. Duration: ${duration}`)
} catch (e) {
const duration = Date.now() - start;
console.log(`(id = ${id}) - Width ${width} Error fetching. ${i+1}/${runs}. Duration: ${duration}`, e)
}
}
console.log(`(id = ${id}) - Finished run. Duration: ` + (Date.now() - runStart));
}
(async function () {
const RUNS = 200;
const parallelRuns = 10;
const promises = [];
const parallelRunStart = Date.now();
console.log(`Running ${parallelRuns} parallel runs`)
for (let i = 0; i < parallelRuns; i++) {
promises.push(doSingleRun(RUNS, i))
}
await Promise.all(promises);
console.log(`Finished parallel runs. Duration ${Date.now() - parallelRunStart}`)
})();
When I run this in Node 14.17.3 on my MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.15.7 (Catalina) with even a modest parallel lane number of 3, after about 120 (x 3) hits of the endpoint the following happens in succession:
Console output ceases in the terminal for the script, indicating the script has halted
Other applications such as my browser are unable to make network connections.
Within 1 - 2 mins other applications on my machine begin to slow down and eventually freeze up.
My entire system crashes with a kernel panic and the machine reboots.
panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff7f91ba1ad5): userspace watchdog timeout: remoted connection watchdog expired, no updates from remoted monitoring thread in 60 seconds, 30 checkins from thread since monitoring enabled 640 seconds ago after loadservice: com.apple.logd, total successful checkins since load (642 seconds ago): 64, last successful checkin: 10 seconds ago
service: com.apple.WindowServer, total successful checkins since load (610 seconds ago): 60, last successful checkin: 10 seconds ago
I can very easily stop of the progression of these symptoms by doing a Ctrl+C in the terminal of my script and force quitting it. Everything quickly gets back to normal. And I can repeat the experiment multiple times before allowing it to crash my machine.
I've monitored Activity Monitor during the progression and there is very little (~1%) CPU usage, memory usage reaches up to maybe 60-70mb, though it is pretty evident that the Network activity is peaking during the script's run.
In my search for others with this problem there were only two Stack Overflow articles that came close:
node.js hangs other programs on my mac
Node script causes system freeze when uploading a lot of files
Anyone have any idea why this would happen? It seems very dangerous that a single app/script could so easily bring down a machine without being killed first by the OS.