One of the most dangerous production problems in Spring Boot APIs is not CPU usage.
It is:
Thread Pool Exhaustion
Connection Pool Exhaustion
This issue silently destroys APIs:
requests start timing out
HikariCP runs out of connections
threads become blocked
Kubernetes starts restarting pods
In this article I explain:
why this happens
how to identify it
common architecture mistakes
transaction problems
blocking calls
proper HikariCP tuning
production-ready fixes
This is one of the most important backend performance topics for Java engineers.