Handling Connection Pool Exhaustion in ASP.NET Core APIs

Quick Answer handling connection pool exhaustion: Tuning MaxPoolSize, setting short ConnectionTimeouts, and using Polly retry/circuit‑breaker logic prevents ASP.NET Core connection pool exhaustion. In a micro‑service that serves 5 kRPS against Azure SQL, the ADO.NET connection pool is the invisible bottleneck that turns a well‑designed API into a cascading failure. Every request that reaches the DbContext layer pulls a socket from a shared bucket. If that bucket is empty, OpenAsync blocks until the ConnectionTimeout expires, turning a quick 20 ms query into a 15‑second timeout. The result is a