Spring Boot - Limit on number of connections created

This setting is derived from the embedded container (tomcat, jetty...).

Tomcat's number of threads

You may specify this property in your application.properties

server.tomcat.max-threads=400

You say you counted 20 threads, however according to this other stackoverflow question/answer, the default number of thread should be 200 with tomcat, since server.tomcat.max-threads's default value is 0. See tomcat's documentation:

The maximum number of request processing threads to be created by this Connector, which therefore determines the maximum number of simultaneous requests that can be handled. If not specified, this attribute is set to 200. If an executor is associated with this connector, this attribute is ignored as the connector will execute tasks using the executor rather than an internal thread pool.

Also, the property for:

• undertow: server.undertow.worker-threads

• jetty: server.jetty.acceptors

You'll find the list of properties in Spring's documentation

Maybe, you can have a look at the springboot's config

server.tomcat.accept-count=100 # Maximum queue length for incoming connection requests when all possible request processing threads are in use.
server.tomcat.additional-tld-skip-patterns= # Comma-separated list of additional patterns that match jars to ignore for TLD scanning.
server.tomcat.background-processor-delay=10s # Delay between the invocation of backgroundProcess methods. If a duration suffix is not specified, seconds will be used.
server.tomcat.basedir= # Tomcat base directory. If not specified, a temporary directory is used.
server.tomcat.max-connections=10000 # Maximum number of connections that the server accepts and processes at any given time.
server.tomcat.max-http-header-size=0 # Maximum size in bytes of the HTTP message header.
server.tomcat.max-http-post-size=2097152 # Maximum size in bytes of the HTTP post content.
server.tomcat.max-threads=200 # Maximum amount of worker threads.
server.tomcat.min-spare-threads=10 # Minimum amount of worker threads.
server.tomcat.port-header=X-Forwarded-Port # Name of the HTTP header used to override the original port value.
server.tomcat.protocol-header= # Header that holds the incoming protocol, usually named "X-Forwarded-Proto".
server.tomcat.protocol-header-https-value=https # Value of the protocol header indicating whether the incoming request uses SSL.
server.tomcat.redirect-context-root=true # Whether requests to the context root should be redirected by appending a / to the path.
server.tomcat.remote-ip-header= # Name of the HTTP header from which the remote IP is extracted. For instance, `X-FORWARDED-FOR`.
server.tomcat.resource.cache-ttl= # Time-to-live of the static resource cache.
server.tomcat.uri-encoding=UTF-8 # Character encoding to use to decode the URI.
server.tomcat.use-relative-redirects= # Whether HTTP 1.1 and later location headers generated by a call to sendRedirect will use relative or absolute redirects.