Solo Developer's Chrome Automation Cap Took Three Wrong Guesses to Get Right

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A solo developer running round-the-clock social media automation on macOS repeatedly misconfigured a concurrency limit on Chrome browser instances, causing silent timeouts rather than visible crashes. The initial cap of 3 concurrent Chrome jobs was set based on the mistaken belief that Chrome was the primary memory culprit, when measurements later revealed other processes like dasd and ComfyUI were the real offenders. This misconfiguration was generating 92 skipped automation runs per day, roughly 30% of all scheduled jobs, before the issue was identified. The developer ultimately raised the slot limit to 6 using a filesystem-based semaphore mechanism that leverages the atomic nature of the POSIX mkdir command to prevent race conditions. The fix was documented inline in the shell script itself, where a discrepancy between a comment saying '5' and the actual value of '6' reflects the rushed, iterative nature of the final correction.

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