elephant flow
jargonnetworking
A single long-lived flow so large it dominates a link - one elephant among thousands of mice.
Backups, replication, and bulk transfers are the elephants; interactive traffic is the mice. One elephant can fill a queue and trample the mice's latency, which is why QoS, ECMP hashing, and flow-aware scheduling all care about telling them apart.
Also known as: elephant and mice flows, mice flows