Self-hosted n8n on free Google Cloud VM survives 5-hour load test with zero silent drops

A developer ran a sustained load test on a self-hosted n8n automation instance running on a free-tier Google Cloud e2-micro VM, firing one webhook event every five seconds for nearly five hours — 136 times its normal rate. Of 2,880 events sent, 2,876 were accepted and none were silently lost, with tail latency actually improving sixfold compared to normal low-traffic operation. The author hypothesizes this improvement stems from the instance staying 'warm' under continuous load, whereas sparse real-world traffic forces cold-path wakeups that inflate p99 latency. The single worst latency spike — 56.7 seconds — was traced not to the application but to the VM's own background apt package-metadata refresh, which drove disk I/O wait above 34% for roughly 45 minutes. The findings suggest that high tail latency on low-traffic self-hosted services may reflect an idleness cost rather than a capacity problem.