The default manifest baked in the exact broken config found on amishparadise: no fast_sync (defaults false, forcing full ring-sig/RandomX verification on every block) and target_max_memory capped at ~2.8GiB, which starved cuprated's DB cache into constant eviction/flush (595GB/24h of block I/O on a node just appending ~2MB blocks every 2 minutes). A reference node with fast_sync = true and an 8GiB cache ran at 2.8% CPU at the same chain height and block rate. Set fast_sync = true and target_max_memory = 8GiB to match the healthy reference config, and raise resources.memory_limit from 4Gi to 10Gi so the container still has headroom above the larger cache. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RR7jRaicvqsJaqQQ92jpPQ