Some Java services don't fail because of traffic. They fail because background jobs don't know when to stop. A background job should never be able to take down your production system. Ours did. Every week. At SAP, we ran a multi-tenant service processing thousands of tenants. Every morning, a scheduled job kicked off - telemetry, cleanup, routine work. Nothing unusual. Until it overlapped with real traffic. Then, within minutes: Heap jumped from 60% → 94% GC went into panic mode Latency spiked 5× OOMKilled No memory leak. No bad deploy. Just a background job that didn't know when to stop. If This Feels Familiar, You're Already at Risk If you've ever: Used @Scheduled and assumed it's safe Configured a thread pool and felt "this should handle it" Relied on auto-scaling to absorb spikes You're sitting on the same failure mode we were. The JVM didn't fail. Our scheduling model did.…