docker laravel app with astro frontend

I have been developing a laravel (with mysql) + astro frontend application locally on my machine using docker and when it came to start testing it on a server I choose to go with a Digital Ocean Droplet. However, on first test I am seeing the CPU hitting 100% usage for hours and eventually the droplet becomes unusable, while initially I am unable to get back into the console. I went back to the drawing board with how my docker configuration was set up for production and decides to try a more powerful droplet (1 intel vcpu + 2GB RAM) and still the same results.

I feel like laravel (mysql) and astro is not exactly a massive application and I certainly don’t expect the machine to be haulting when trying to run these services for the first time. I will point out that laravel will get installed (+ other composer dependencies) on first run and node modules need to be installed on first run, so that may be a one time additional load, but to halt for hours seems wrong.

Are other people able to run these minor applications on a droplet or am I forced to go App Platform instead?