Hey Richard,
I’m facing a similar problem on my end. My app is running on Render.com, Strapi v4.4.5 and S3 using the official provider @strapi/provider-upload-aws-s3 - npm.
I am using their Starter plan which works fine most of the time, except when I’m trying to upload an image. I don’t understand why uploading a 1MB would cause such a spike in memory, does that have something to do with processing? For now, I had to update to the next larger plan which is ~3-4 times more expensive due to this issue…
Is there maybe a way to instruct Strapi on how much memory is available and cap it at that?
BTW, I didn’t update to the latest Strapi v4.5.4 yet as that gives me another bug, my collections wouldn’t load in the admin area / Content Manager. I haven’t looked into that one yet as there was no hard need for me to upgrade until now.