[Bug]: arm64 image ships ~2.4GB of build-time waste (core dumps + duplicate Chromium cache), root-caused to QEMU CI emulation

[GoSlowPoke168]

crawl4ai version

0.9.2

Expected Behavior

The published arm64 Docker image should only contain files needed at runtime. Build/test artifacts (crash dumps from the crawl4ai-doctor sanity check) and intermediate install artifacts (the root-owned Playwright browser cache, superseded by the copy made for appuser) should be cleaned up before the image layers are committed.

Current Behavior

unclecode/crawl4ai:latest (arm64) reports as 9.06GB via docker images. Inspecting a freshly-pulled container shows two separate sources of dead weight, totaling ~2.4GB of its ~5.5GB live filesystem:

1. Core dumps in /app (~926MB)

-r--r--r-- root root 510M /app/qemu_headless_shell_20260715-085214_28.core
-r--r--r-- root root 208M /app/qemu_headless_shell_20260715-085211_34.core
-r--r--r-- root root 208M /app/qemu_headless_shell_20260715-085211_32.core

• These are dated at image build time, not container runtime, and are root-owned/read-only, so end users can't remove them from a running container.

2. Duplicate Chromium install (~1.5GB)

1.5G  /root/.cache/ms-playwright       (dead - root never runs; container runs as appuser)
958M  /home/appuser/.cache/ms-playwright  (actually used at runtime)

• playwright install --with-deps installs the browser to /root/.cache (running as root during build), then a later RUN step cp -r's it to /home/appuser/.cache for the actual runtime user, but never deletes the original. Both copies ship in the final image.

Is this reproducible?

Yes

Inputs Causing the Bug

N/A — not input-dependent. Present in every pull of the arm64 image, not triggered by user config.

Steps to Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce:
1. docker pull unclecode/crawl4ai:latest
2. docker run --rm -it unclecode/crawl4ai:latest bash
3. ls -lh /app/*.core
4. du -sh /root/.cache/ms-playwright /home/appuser/.cache/ms-playwright

Code snippets

docker history — confirms duplicate layer cost:

$ docker history --no-trunc unclecode/crawl4ai:latest | grep -E "chown -R root|cp -r.*ms-playwright"
972MB   RUN chown -R root:root ${APP_HOME} && chmod -R a-w ${APP_HOME}

1GB     RUN mkdir -p /home/appuser/.cache/ms-playwright \
          && cp -r /root/.cache/ms-playwright/chromium-* \
                   /root/.cache/ms-playwright/chromium_headless_shell-* \
                   /home/appuser/.cache/ms-playwright/ \
          && chown -R appuser:appuser /home/appuser/.cache/ms-playwright



docker-release.yml — confirms cross-arch QEMU build:


$ grep -A3 "platforms:" .github/workflows/docker-release.yml

          platforms: linux/amd64,linux/arm64
          cache-from: type=gha
          cache-to: type=gha,mode=max

OS

Linux (Raspberry Pi OS, arm64

Python version

3.12

Browser

Chromium (bundled headless_shell, via Playwright build 1228)

Browser version

149.0.7827.0

Error logs & Screenshots (if applicable)

docker history shows the chown -R root:root $APP_HOME && chmod -R a-w $APP_HOME layer at 972MB, matching the ~926MB of .core files in /app. du -sh on a running container shows /root/.cache/ms-playwright (1.5G) and /home/appuser/.cache/ms-playwright (958M) as separate, duplicate browser installs

[nightcityblade]

Hi, I'd like to work on this. I'll submit a PR shortly.