Serious question, is it really more difficult fir server side JS? At least you don't have to fiddle around with DOM references. The potential impact on the server side is of course potentially bigger.
I mean it depends on the application naturally, but flame graphs or no and especially when dealing with heap dump comparisons, sometimes very opaquely named symbols, etc, it can be an exercise in frustration.
Browsers - Chrome especially - have really fantastic tooling for doing stuff like this. I think there's some way to hook those up to Node, but they're very readily available on the front-end
You can use chrome's tooling directly from nodejs. You just need to invoke nodejs with `node --inspect` (or --inspect-brk to pause before the first line of code is executed). Then open chrome's dev tools. A nodejs icon will magically appear at the top left of the dev tools pane. If you click that it'll open a new window with chrome's debugger, profiler and memory tools working directly with nodejs's v8 instance.