Caching

Cache Stampede

A hot key expires and thousands of concurrent requests all miss and hit the origin simultaneously.

Why interviewers ask about it

A genuine outage mechanism. Fix with single-flight locking, probabilistic early recompute, or serve-stale-while-revalidate.

Many keys expiring at the same moment because they were populated together with identical TTLs.

This term is part of the free System Design interview preparation module - browse the full glossary for every definition.