The runner fleet that scales to zero
The homelab finally ran out. Not disk this time, capacity. So the overflow went to AWS, on the condition that it costs nothing when nobody's pushing.
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8 pages
Performance
The release that OOM-killed its own compiler
A wedding-photo culler ran out of memory compiling an LLM SDK it has never once called. The release had been running for thirty-eight minutes at that point.
The repo that downloaded 170 gigabytes
An hour to compile and 170GB of artefacts to clean up afterwards. Rust has a built-in answer to that, and I only used half of it.
Sandboxed isn't safe
A security review read "safely process untrusted media" and asked the harder question. A sandbox stops escape; it does not stop exhaustion.
One cache key per lockfile filled my runner's disk
The documented cargo cache key gives every lockfile its own cache. On a self-hosted runner that fills the disk. Whose disk was the advice for?
My blog was shipping 1.2 MB banners
A post hit Hacker News and the analytics showed pages far heavier than a static site should be. The cover images were the payload.
The fastest job is the one you never run
Half my CI jobs ran for no reason on every merge request. Skipping them with rules:changes, and why that is trickier than the manual suggests.
Stop installing the same tools on every pipeline job
Nearly every CI job began by fetching and compiling the same tools. Baking them into one image instead, and what that saved per pipeline.
