Mercado Libre Blocks Public Search API; Memory Boost Lifts Scraper Success Rate to 90%

Mercado Libre has permanently shut down anonymous access to its public search API, returning a 403 Forbidden error consistently across all proxy types, including datacenter and residential connections. The HTML search page remains accessible but serves a proof-of-work challenge only to residential IPs, while other connections receive a deceptive 200 response containing a decoy asset bundle with no real results. Scraping attempts were failing not due to bot detection but because containers ran out of RAM mid-challenge, as Mercado Libre's search page renders a 3.3 MB DOM. Doubling Actor memory from 4 GB to 8 GB raised the challenge-clearance rate from 50% to 90%, with failures at lower memory caused by out-of-memory kills rather than blocks. The updated scraper now runs at 8,192 MB, clears the challenge once per session, and retrieves up to nine pages of results at a cost of $5.20 per 1,000 results.