Woodpecker on a Low-RAM VPS — Serialize, Cap Heap, Reuse Workspace
Dependabot was quiet and Gitleaks was green, but Woodpecker started killing builds with exit 137. On a small VPS, running Trivy beside a Vite production build is not free — it is RAM arithmetic. The agent had enough CPU; it did not have enough memory to hold parallel security scanners and a full Node compile at the same time.
The Discord and Plane article covers what happens when CI fails. This one covers why green pipelines started dying before deploy — and the three changes in .woodpecker.yml that fixed it without upgrading the VPS.
Woodpecker runs each step in a container on the same host. Gitleaks, Trivy, DefectDojo upload, lint, vite build, and check-qa all compete for the same RAM budget. When steps overlap, the Linux OOM killer terminates the heaviest process — often Node mid-build.