Developer swaps headless Chrome for a lightweight Mermaid renderer to cut deploy size and cold starts

A developer needed flowcharts and sequence diagrams rendered as images within an agent pipeline. Their first approach used Puppeteer with headless Chrome, which added about 300MB to every container rebuild. The setup also slowed cold starts to several seconds and caused memory spikes that got smaller worker instances killed mid-render. They replaced it with a single-purpose endpoint that converts Mermaid syntax into base64 PNG or SVG output, requiring no local rendering stack. The developer concludes that the cost of general-purpose tools should be measured per deployment before adopting them as defaults, and reports that cold starts returned to acceptable levels.