Thundering herd

Many clients wake up and retry at exactly the same moment, for example after an outage, and knock the recovering service down again. Jitter, backoff and rate limits spread them out.

Where it shows up in real systems

  • Rate limiter

    Protects the system from abusive clients and retry storms by answering HTTP 429 above the limit. Fixed windows let bursts through at window edges; sliding windows and token buckets are smoother.

    In production: Envoy rate limit service, Redis + Lua, NGINX limit_req, Cloudflare Rate Limiting

See it break, then fix it

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