🔒 Paid
Cache Stampede
A popular cache key has expired under peak read traffic, and every request that would have hit the cache is now missing at once. The origin database is being hit with a thundering herd of duplicate lookups, latency is climbing, and the request queue is growing. Diagnose the stampede and stop it from recurring before the origin falls over.
- Difficulty
- Senior
- Expected Time
- ~15 min
- Category
- Caching
Skills
- Diagnosing cache stampedes and thundering herds
- Request coalescing and dog-piling prevention
- Cache TTL tradeoffs under load
- Recognizing plausible-but-harmful mitigations
System Architecture
- API Service
- Redis Cache
- Origin Database
- Analytics Writer
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