By keneucker
I have been developing a Laravel (mysql) + astro frontend application using docker to manage the services locally. Now that I am at the point where I want to test a production setup, I went with a Digital Ocean Droplet and the cheapest $4 configuration. When testing the startup of the docker container for the first time, I see the CPU usage climb to 100% and the droplet eventually becomes unreachable for hours.
So I went back to the drawing board with my docker configuration and tried to ensure that it was more tailored for production, and I also tried another configuration, this time with an intel vcpu and 2GB of RAM. Still, I am seeing the machine climb to 100% CPU usage and the droplet becoming unreachable for hours.
Does anyone else have examples of making this kind of small application setup working on a droplet or do I need to consider using App Platform instead?
One thing I will mention is that composer needs to install laravel and other dependencies on first run as well as node modules need to be installed on first run. I expected that this might take a little time but to be at 100% CPU usage for hours just does not make sense to me.
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Heya, @keneucker
This behaviour is actually very common on small Droplets and usually isn’t a Docker or DigitalOcean issue.
What’s causing it is that CPU-heavy build steps are running at container startup. composer install, npm install, Astro builds, native module compilation, and MySQL initialization are all expensive operations. On a $4 Droplet (and even on 1 vCPU / 2 GB), doing all of this at once will easily peg the CPU at 100% for a long time and make the Droplet appear unreachable, including over SSH.
For production, these steps should not run at runtime. The usual approach is to:
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Run Composer and Node installs during the Docker image build
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Build frontend assets ahead of time
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Deploy pre-built images to the Droplet
Once installs are moved out of startup, container launch time drops from minutes (or hours) to seconds.
More RAM helps a bit, but this is primarily a single-core CPU bottleneck, and Docker adds some overhead on top. App Platform avoids this because builds happen elsewhere, but it’s not required — many people run Laravel + frontend stacks on Droplets successfully once builds are handled in CI or multi-stage Docker builds.
Hope that this helps!
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