When Your Homelab Grows Up: How SQLite Took Down My k3s Control Plane

Originally published at wostal.eu . TL;DR : My Hetzner k3s lab quietly became a platform. Dozens of operators with leader-election leases hammered the default datastore — SQLite via kine — until compaction entered a death-spiral: 1.36M rows, a 13.8 GB WAL that wouldn't checkpoint, CPU pinned at 99%, load average 79 on 8 cores. I stopped the bleeding by truncating the WAL, then migrated the control plane to embedded etcd (7.5 GB SQLite → 313 MB etcd, load 79 → 5). This is the full postmortem — and the lessons. This is a war story, not a tutorial. It's about the moment a homelab stops being a homelab and starts behaving like production — without ever announcing it. The cluster in question, homelab , is the Hetzner k3s setup I wrote about previously . It started small. It did not stay small. In this post I'll cover: How an overgrown lab broke the default datastore — the kine/SQLite compaction death-spiral The firefight — measuring instead of guessing, and the fix that actually worked The permanent fix — migrating the control plane to embedded etcd, and the honest caveats The meta-lesson — how to recognize when your lab has become a platform A diagnostic runbook — so next time it's minutes, not hours There's a companion piece to this incident. The CI pipeline that ran this etcd migration was itself freshly — and badly — migrated, and debugging it cost me hours over a single missing newline. I split that into its own post: I Let an AI Re-Platform My CI Pipeline. Here's What Broke. Context: it's "just a homelab" — except it isn't homelab began like any homelab: one k3s node on Hetzner, a few things to play with. The problem is that over months it quietly became a platform . A single master node ( cx43 , 8 vCPU / 16 GB, untainted, and also carrying Longhorn and workloads) now runs: ArgoCD, Kargo, Crossplane/Upbound, CloudNativePG, EMQX, Longhorn, trivy-operator, kubescape, Gatekeeper, Goldilocks/VPA, VictoriaMetrics, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Argo Workflows/Events/Rollouts, kga