Cache Stampede
When many requests hit the database simultaneously because a popular cache entry expired. Solved with locking, probabilistic early expiration, or request coalescing.
What is Cache Stampede?
When many requests hit the database simultaneously because a popular cache entry expired. Solved with locking, probabilistic early expiration, or request coalescing.
Cache Stampede is a foundational concept that sits in the Caching Strategies area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Cache Stampede" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Caching
Storing frequently accessed data in a faster storage layer so you don't have to fetch it from the original (slower) source every time.
TTL
Time To Live: how long a cached entry, DNS record, or packet is valid before it expires and must be refreshed or discarded.
Cache Eviction
The process of removing entries from a cache when it's full. Common policies: LRU (least recently used), LFU (least frequently used), FIFO (first in, first out).