Word.ws English Dictionary

thundering herd

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.

Noun

thundering herd (uncountable)

  1. 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.
    • 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

Questions about thundering herd

What does thundering herd mean?
Thundering herd means 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.
What part of speech is thundering herd?
Thundering herd is a noun.

Words near thundering herd in the dictionary

  1. thunderheaded
  2. thunderheads
  3. thunderiest
  4. thunderin'
  5. thundering
  6. thundering herd
  7. thundering herd problems
  8. thunderingly
  9. thunderings
  10. thunderless
  11. thunderlight

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thundering herd (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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