23/05/2026 10:25 am
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So Ive been messing around with the OpenClaw source for like three years now and honestly I thought I had the deployment side of things figured out but apparently not. Usually I just run everything locally or on a private VPS but my budget is basically zero right now because of some car repairs and I really need to host a public build for this mini tournament my speedrun discord is doing next Saturday. I was thinking about just throwing it on GitHub Pages but since I want to include some of the custom logic and maybe a lobby system it needs more than just static hosting.
My logic was to go with something like Fly.io because they used to be great for small containers but I keep hitting these weird OOM errors when the assets try to load into memory during the initial bootup. Its super frustrating because the game isnt even that heavy but the way OpenClaw handles the asset pack seems to trigger some aggressive kill process on these free tiers because of the memory spikes. Then I tried Heroku but their free tier is dead anyway and Render takes like ten minutes to spin up the instance which is just annoying for people trying to join a quick match.
I even looked into Oracle Cloud because their free tier is supposedly massive but they wont even accept my debit card for the verification step and I dont have a real credit card to give them right now. Im based in the US so latency shouldnt be a huge deal on most providers but I just need something that wont choke on the file structure. OpenClaw needs to be able to read those .rez files efficiently and some of these cloud hosts have really slow disk I/O on their free plans which makes the loading screens take forever.
Has anyone actually found a reliable spot for this? I dont mind if I have to do some weird configuration or use a specific Dockerfile to get it running without the host killing it for excessive resource usage or whatever. Its just for a small group of like 10-15 people max so it doesnt need to be some enterprise level stuff... just needs to actually work without crashing every five minutes. Any ideas?
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23/05/2026 10:25 am
Man that OOM issue on Fly is a classic. OpenClaw asset loading is basically a memory bomb for those small 256MB micro-vms because it tries to map the .rez files into memory almost immediately. Ive had some luck using Koyeb Micro Instance 512MB RAM recently. Their free tier is actually pretty generous with the resource limits compared to Render, and the cold starts arent nearly as painful. The trick is that OpenClaw needs enough headroom for that initial burst. Here are a few options that worked for me:
- Koyeb Nanoscale 512MB RAM
- Google Cloud Platform e2-micro 1GB RAM
- Zeabur Hobby Plan Shared CPU I personally prefer the Google Cloud e2-micro for this stuff. Since it is a persistent VM, you dont deal with the cold start lag that kills the vibe in a speedrun tournament. Since you are in the US, you can pick a region like us-east1 or us-central1 and the latency will be basically zero for your discord group. Just make sure you set up a swap file. Even a small 1GB swap on the disk will let the .rez loader breathe without triggering a restart. Its way more reliable than those serverless container hosts for something like this. If you get stuck on the GCP firewall settings just ping me, they can be a bit of a pain to open up for game lobbies and custom ports.
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23/05/2026 10:50 am
Late to this thread but I've been through this exact headache with asset-heavy builds. If Fly is killing your process, you might want to consider Northflank Free Tier 0.5 vCPU 1GB RAM. That 1GB memory headroom is basically essential for OpenClaw because of how it handles those .rez archives during the initial spin-up. I'd be careful with your Docker setup tho... make sure to use a slim base image or the build might fail the storage check. Another decent shot is Zeabur Developer Plan Free Tier 0.5 CPU 512MB RAM. Their platform is a bit more chill about temporary spikes compared to the aggressive OOM killer on Fly. I would suggest running a load test with a few friends before Saturday because if the lobby system starts leaking memory with 15 people in it, the whole thing will definitely crash. Also, you gotta make sure you're picking a US-based region in the settings or the latency will ruin the speedrun vibes. It's a bit of a gamble with free tiers honestly, especially when you're already stressed about car repairs and money, so just keep an eye on the logs. Don't expect enterprise stability, but it should hold up for a small tournament if you configure it right.
