the thundering herd
termcloudnetworking
When many clients or processes wake and contend for one resource at the same instant, overwhelming it.
A cache entry expires and a thousand requests simultaneously miss and stampede the database; or a dropped connection triggers every client to reconnect on the same second. Fixes spread the surge out - jitter, request coalescing, and staggered retries - so the herd arrives as a trickle instead of a wall.
Also known as: thundering herd problem