Spring lists SO as the only place to ask questions on their community page, which is why I ask this rather generic question here. It may not be the best fit for SO, but, according to Spring's community overview page, there's no other adequate place to ask such questions.
I have a spring boot application built on spring cloud gateway (version 2) which also uses an embedded hazelcast cluster. It runs in multiple instances, which communicate via hazelcast. Everything works fine, except under heavy load. If one instance fails, restarting it is no longer possible.
When the instance is restarted while the cluster of instances is under heavy load, it will start creating and wiring beans, up to some point, after which it will not do anything spring-related anymore. Hazelcast-generated messages are visible in the log (with root log level DEBUG), past that point, but nothing generated by spring or the application itself.
In order to restart that one instance that failed, I need to stop the load generation, wait some 10-15 minutes, then restart the failed instance. Then the new/restarted instance starts up rather quickly, with no problems at all.
The load consists of http requests which get proxied to another application, and is of such nature that it generates a lot of read accesses to hazelcast's distributed storage, but very few writes.
My problem: I have no idea how to debug this. Since the http endpoint never becomes available, there's no way I can query metrics or other actuator information.
So my question is: what tools or mechanisms can I employ to debug this problem? I.e. how can I find out exactly how the boot sequence under heavy load of the other instances of the hazelcast cluster differs from the boot sequence when there is no load at all in the cluster? Once I have this information, the problem is narrowed down enough for me to investigate it further on my own.