A software circuit breaker observes an amount of free memory available in an application server and a duration of a garbage collection process performed by the application server. The application server executes an agent comprising a plurality of processes for monitoring performance of the application server. Based on the amount of free memory and duration of the garbage collection process, the circuit breaker anticipates a likely crash of the application server. In response to anticipating the likely crash, the circuit breaker disables one or more processes of the agent.