Deploy and Host Tallylamp Worker on Railway

Add another 1,000 processes to a Tallylamp you already run.

Railway gives each service 1,000 processes and threads, and will not raise that on a normal plan. One Chrome on a few heavy pages can use 700 of them. So when your Tallylamp answers fleet_full and its dashboard shows the host near 1,000, you are not short of memory, and a bigger plan will not help. Another service will. A worker is that service: it runs browsers for the Tallylamp you already have, with a process limit of its own.

If one Tallylamp runs all your browsers without trouble, you do not need this. Set TALLYLAMP_CHROME_CPUS=4 on it first. In a ten-minute test on Railway that took one browser from 346 threads to 203.

This template is not a Tallylamp by itself. It has no dashboard and no MCP endpoint. Deploy Tallylamp first.

About Hosting Tallylamp Worker

One service from the same image as Tallylamp, plus a volume at /data for the profiles of the browsers it runs. It has no public domain. Your Tallylamp reaches it over the project's private network, and it answers nothing else.

You still have one Tallylamp: one dashboard, one /mcp URL, the same agent tokens. Each browser's page says which host it runs on. You can move a stopped browser between hosts, logins included.

Add it to your project

In your Tallylamp dashboard, open Workers and press Add worker. Copy the join token. It works once and expires in an hour.
In the same Railway project as your Tallylamp, choose New, then Template, and pick Tallylamp Worker.
Paste the token into TALLYLAMP_JOIN and deploy.
The worker shows under Workers within a minute. From then on, when your Tallylamp has no room for a new browser, it starts on the worker.

It has to be the same project. Railway's private network does not cross projects, so a worker in another one cannot be reached.

To put a browser you already have on the worker, stop it, open its page, and use Runs on.

Why Deploy Tallylamp Worker on Railway?

Railway's limit is per service, so a second service is the one way to get more room on a normal plan. Railway also gives the two services a private network. Browser traffic between your Tallylamp and its worker never crosses the public internet.

Common Use Cases

Keep a production browser away from test browsers. Put one kind on the worker and the other on the main instance, and neither can use up the other's processes.
Run more browsers at once than one service holds.
Give one heavy browser a host to itself.

Dependencies for Tallylamp Worker

A running Tallylamp, version 0.10.0 or newer, in the same Railway project. The worker and the Tallylamp it joins must run the same release. A worker that tries to join on another release refuses to start and names both versions.

Deployment Dependencies

Tallylamp on Railway
The image ghcr.io/nxfi777/tallylamp, pinned to a release digest
A Railway volume at /data

Settings

Variable	Needed	What it does
`TALLYLAMP_JOIN`	Yes	The join token from Add worker. Setting it is what makes this image run as a worker.
`TALLYLAMP_CHROME_CPUS`	No	Set to `4` by this template. Runs each Chrome on four CPUs, which cuts its threads by about 40%. Remove it to let Chrome use every CPU.
`TALLYLAMP_WORKER_NAME`	No	The name shown in the dashboard. Defaults to the Railway service name.
`TALLYLAMP_SANDBOX`	No	`auto`, as on Tallylamp.

Leave TALLYLAMP_DATA_DIR and PORT alone. The worker finds its own private address from Railway.

What a worker does not do yet

These work only for browsers on the main instance: Full browser, agent control of Chrome's own windows, tunnels to your machine, saved profiles, and file uploads from an agent. A browser on a worker refuses each one and says to move it back first. The live view, takeover, guest links and per-browser proxies all work on a worker.

Room held for a pinned browser is per host too. On a worker, a start is checked against that worker's own limit, and nothing is stopped to make room for it.

Updates are your choice

The template pins an image digest and leaves automatic updates off. Upgrade the worker and your Tallylamp to the same release, together. While they differ, the dashboard says so and the worker is given no browsers to start.