thundering herd

noun

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.

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Meanings

nounthundering herd (uncountable)
  1. uncountablecomputingThe 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.

    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.

    2016, Niall Richard Murphy, Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, O'Reilly, →ISBN
Cite this entry
APA

thundering herd. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/thundering%20herd

MLA

“thundering herd.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/thundering%20herd. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “thundering herd,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/thundering%20herd.

Source: thundering herd on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.