Thread Starvation in Kotlin Coroutines: How JDBC Exhausts HikariCP at Scale

Kotlin coroutines with JDBC create a critical architectural mismatch: while coroutines appear to suspend, the underlying JDBC thread remains blocked, exhausting connection pools during traffic spikes. This silent failure pattern causes cascading service degradation across distributed systems. Mastering the three production-tested fixes—dedicated dispatcher sizing, R2DBC migration, and circuit breaker patterns—is essential for building resilient backend services that survive 10x load increases without catastrophic failure.