diff --git a/Dockerfile b/Dockerfile
index 2c4af21..b98c980 100644
--- a/Dockerfile
+++ b/Dockerfile
@@ -73,4 +73,44 @@ EXPOSE 8000
 RUN chmod +x /code/docker-entrypoint.sh
 
 ENTRYPOINT ["bash","/code/docker-entrypoint.sh"]
-CMD ["uvicorn", "DataSpace.asgi:application", "--host", "0.0.0.0", "--port", "8000"]
+
+# Served with multiple workers, which is what keeps this from exhausting
+# Postgres.
+#
+# Django runs sync views under ASGI via sync_to_async(thread_sensitive=True),
+# which executes them on ONE shared thread per process. With a single worker
+# that means exactly one sync request is processed at a time, no matter how
+# many arrive. Measured on dev before this change: 12 concurrent calls to
+# /api/auth/keycloak/login/ returned in 4s, 7s, 10s, 14s ... 36s - near-perfect
+# ~3s increments, queued behind each other.
+#
+# That queue is what killed the database. Every in-flight request holds a
+# connection while it waits its turn - measured at one connection per request,
+# so 20 concurrent calls took the connection count from 6 to 26. Deep enough
+# queues reached max_connections (100) and Postgres started refusing with
+# "FATAL: sorry, too many clients already", which surfaced as 500s, while
+# requests that waited past nginx's 60s proxy timeout surfaced as 504s. It
+# also broke deploys, because manage.py could not get a connection either.
+#
+# Workers are processes, so N workers give N concurrent sync requests and the
+# queue drains N times faster. The work here is I/O-bound (waiting on
+# Keycloak), so this helps well beyond the 2 CPUs on the dev box.
+#
+# UVICORN_LIMIT_CONCURRENCY is the backstop: total in-flight requests are
+# capped at workers x limit, which must stay under Postgres max_connections
+# minus headroom for other clients. Excess requests get a fast 503 instead of
+# queueing until the database runs out of slots - shedding load is recoverable,
+# exhausting connections takes the deploy pipeline down with it.
+# Sized to the dev box, not to a formula. One worker measured at 740MB
+# resident with only ~2.4GB available on the host, so 4 workers risked an OOM
+# that would have been a worse outage than the one this fixes. Two workers land
+# near 1.3GB and match the 2 CPUs.
+#
+# Two workers alone would only double throughput, but the commit that removes
+# two of the three Keycloak round-trips cuts per-request time as well, and the
+# two compound. Raise UVICORN_WORKERS on a bigger box - it is env-tunable for
+# exactly that reason, and worth revisiting if memory there grows.
+ENV UVICORN_WORKERS=2 \
+    UVICORN_LIMIT_CONCURRENCY=15
+
+CMD ["sh", "-c", "exec uvicorn DataSpace.asgi:application --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 --workers ${UVICORN_WORKERS} --limit-concurrency ${UVICORN_LIMIT_CONCURRENCY}"]
diff --git a/api/utils/keycloak_utils.py b/api/utils/keycloak_utils.py
index f6937d7..d6f4f46 100644
--- a/api/utils/keycloak_utils.py
+++ b/api/utils/keycloak_utils.py
@@ -54,12 +54,19 @@ def get_token(self, username: str, password: str) -> Dict[str, Any]:
             logger.error(f"Error getting token: {e}")
             raise
 
-    def validate_token(self, token: str) -> Dict[str, Any]:
+    def validate_token(
+        self, token: str, token_info: Optional[Dict[str, Any]] = None
+    ) -> Dict[str, Any]:
         """
         Validate a token (Django JWT or Keycloak) and return the user info.
 
         Args:
             token: The token to validate
+            token_info: An introspection response for this token, if the caller
+                already has one. Passing it avoids a second introspect call to
+                Keycloak - callers that need the introspection data themselves
+                (for roles and organizations) would otherwise cause two
+                identical network round-trips per request.
 
         Returns:
             Dict containing the user information
@@ -107,14 +114,36 @@ def validate_token(self, token: str) -> Dict[str, Any]:
 
         # If Django JWT validation failed, try Keycloak token validation
         try:
-            # Verify the token is valid
-            token_info = self.keycloak_openid.introspect(token)
+            # Verify the token is valid. Reuses the caller's introspection when
+            # one was supplied, rather than repeating the round-trip.
+            if token_info is None:
+                token_info = self.keycloak_openid.introspect(token)
             if not token_info.get("active", False):
                 logger.warning("Token is not active")
                 return {}
 
-            # Try to get user info from the userinfo endpoint
-            # If that fails (403), fall back to token introspection data
+            # Introspection often already carries everything needed. Calling
+            # userinfo anyway costs a round-trip that, on deployments where the
+            # client lacks the scope for it, is guaranteed to fail with 403 and
+            # fall through to exactly the same data - measured as roughly a
+            # third of this request's latency on dev.
+            if token_info.get("sub") and (
+                token_info.get("email") or token_info.get("preferred_username")
+            ):
+                user_info = {
+                    "sub": token_info.get("sub"),
+                    "preferred_username": token_info.get("username")
+                    or token_info.get("preferred_username"),
+                    "email": token_info.get("email"),
+                    "email_verified": token_info.get("email_verified", False),
+                    "name": token_info.get("name"),
+                    "given_name": token_info.get("given_name"),
+                    "family_name": token_info.get("family_name"),
+                }
+                return {k: v for k, v in user_info.items() if v is not None}
+
+            # Otherwise ask userinfo, falling back to introspection data if it
+            # is not available to this client.
             try:
                 user_info = self.keycloak_openid.userinfo(token)
                 if isinstance(user_info, bytes):
diff --git a/api/views/auth.py b/api/views/auth.py
index 94d98dc..98b1029 100644
--- a/api/views/auth.py
+++ b/api/views/auth.py
@@ -24,17 +24,20 @@ def post(self, request: Request) -> Response:
                 status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST,
             )
 
+        # Introspect once and reuse it. This used to introspect twice per
+        # request - once inside validate_token and again here for roles and
+        # organizations - which is a wasted round-trip to Keycloak on every
+        # login while a database connection is held open.
+        token_info = keycloak_manager.keycloak_openid.introspect(keycloak_token)
+
         # Validate the token and get user info
-        user_info = keycloak_manager.validate_token(keycloak_token)
+        user_info = keycloak_manager.validate_token(keycloak_token, token_info=token_info)
         if not user_info:
             return Response(
                 {"error": "Invalid or expired token"},
                 status=status.HTTP_401_UNAUTHORIZED,
             )
 
-        # Get token introspection data for roles and organizations
-        token_info = keycloak_manager.keycloak_openid.introspect(keycloak_token)
-
         # Get user roles and organizations from the token introspection data
         roles = keycloak_manager.get_user_roles_from_token_info(token_info)
         organizations = keycloak_manager.get_user_organizations_from_token_info(token_info)
diff --git a/api/views/health.py b/api/views/health.py
index a9684b3..9f1d0d8 100644
--- a/api/views/health.py
+++ b/api/views/health.py
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 import structlog
 from django.conf import settings
 from django.core.cache import cache
-from django.db import connection
+from django.db import connection, connections
 from django.http import HttpRequest, JsonResponse
 from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
 from opentelemetry import trace
@@ -32,16 +32,38 @@ def health_check(request: HttpRequest) -> JsonResponse:
         "telemetry": {"status": "unknown"},
     }
 
-    # Check database
+    # Check database.
+    #
+    # Two distinct checks, because they fail independently:
+    #
+    #   1. The request's own connection still works.
+    #   2. A NEW connection can still be opened.
+    #
+    # Only checking (1) is how this endpoint reported
+    # {"database": "healthy"} in 0.44s while Postgres was refusing new
+    # connections with "FATAL: sorry, too many clients already" and both the
+    # login endpoint and the deploy pipeline were failing on exactly that. The
+    # existing connection is already established, so it keeps answering
+    # SELECT 1 no matter how saturated the server is - which made a green
+    # health check actively misleading during an outage.
     try:
         with connection.cursor() as cursor:
             cursor.execute("SELECT 1")
-            status["database"] = {
-                "status": "healthy",
-                "message": "Successfully connected to database",
-            }
-            if current_span:
-                current_span.set_attribute("database.status", "healthy")
+
+        # Deliberately a fresh connection, closed immediately. This is the
+        # check that catches connection exhaustion.
+        new_connection = connections.create_connection("default")
+        try:
+            new_connection.ensure_connection()
+        finally:
+            new_connection.close()
+
+        status["database"] = {
+            "status": "healthy",
+            "message": "Successfully connected to database",
+        }
+        if current_span:
+            current_span.set_attribute("database.status", "healthy")
     except Exception as e:
         logger.error("Database health check failed", error=str(e))
         status["database"] = {