What is happening is that the pool implementation eagerly attempts to repopulate the pool whenever the current pool size goes below the specified steady-pool-size. In your case since the steady-pool-size is 1, as soon a bean is taken out of the pool to service a new request, the pool implementation (through a background thread) populates the pool with another instance.
Now when the request finishes the instance is returned back to the pool, but since you have set the max-pool-size also to 1, it destroys the instance.
Try setting the max-pool-size to greater than 1
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