Skip to content
Free public beta until December 4, 2026: every course is open, no card needed. After that, the first chapter of each course stays free and full access is a one-time $39 ($19 for up to 100 founding members chosen for helpful feedback). Your progress is kept. How the beta works

thundering herd

Thousands of devices all reconnecting at the same moment and overwhelming the server.

A thundering herd is the synchronized burst of reconnects after a shared outage ends; jitter breaks the synchronization.

Examples

  • A server restart drops 10,000 devices; without jitter, all of them retry at exactly the same instant 8 s later.

  • Fixed-wait retries from every device in a building hit the server together, so it crashes again as soon as it restarts.

See also

jitter exponential backoff backoff cap
Read the full section →