Curing a Transcription Worker That Kept Dying on Cloud Run with Streaming (opens in new tab)

An audio transcription worker kept getting killed by OOM on Cloud Run. Bumping the memory allocation calmed it down for a while, but that only inflated the bill without fixing anything. Crash, raise the limit, crash again — that was the steady state. In the end, changing how the processing was structured improved memory, cost, transcription accuracy, and testability all at once. This post is a record of the path I took from treating symptoms to curing the root cause. The punchline up front: w...