thundering herd problem

English

Noun

thundering herd problem (plural thundering herd problems)

1. (computing theory) The undesirable situation where a large number of processes waiting for an event are awoken whenever the event occurs, and then engage in a conflict over which process handles the event.
   • 2016, Niall Richard Murphy, Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems‎^[1], O'Reilly, →ISBN:

     Adding to execution and monitoring challenges is the “thundering herd” problem endemic to distributed systems, also discussed in Chapter 24. Given a large enough periodic pipeline, for each cycle, potentially thousands of workers immediately start work.

Further reading

• Eric S[teven] Raymond, editor (2003 December 29), “thundering herd problem”, in The Jargon File, version 4.4.7.