@balrogboogie this looks similar to what I had happen when I tried to upgrade my instance to (I think) 1.6 awhile back. It has been fine since I provisioned 4GiB of memory to the VM it is installed in. It was the best guess that was the problem when the physical server hosting the VM barked at me that a VM was at 100% memory use.
Mastodon is great but a bit "husky". It could be worse though at least it isn't an electron app!