Thundering Herd

/ˈθʌn.dɚ.ɪŋ hɝːd/ · Noun · Development · Origin: 1997

Definitions

  1. A concurrency problem where a large number of processes or clients are simultaneously woken up or triggered by a single event, causing a massive spike in resource contention that degrades or crashes the system.

    In plain English: Imagine a hundred people all rushing through one door at the same time. In software, this happens when many clients all react to the same event simultaneously and overwhelm the system.

    Example: "Our cache key expired and 10,000 requests all tried to regenerate it at the same instant — classic thundering herd. We added a lock so only one request rebuilds while the rest wait."

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