Cache Stampede Problem Explained: What is Thundering Herd & How to Fix It | System Design Interview

Описание: Master the cache stampede problem (also known as the thundering herd problem) in this comprehensive system design tutorial! Cache stampede is a critical cascading failure that occurs when multiple concurrent requests simultaneously try to access expired or missing cache data, overwhelming your database and causing severe performance degradation. In this video, we'll explain what cache stampede is, why it happens when cache entries expire, and how it has caused major outages at companies like Facebook. Understanding the cache stampede problem is essential for system design interviews and building high-performance distributed systems that can handle millions of requests.


We'll dive deep into proven solutions to prevent cache stampede including cache locking mechanisms, probabilistic early expiration, asynchronous cache refresh strategies, and request coalescing patterns. You'll learn the difference between thundering herd and dog-piling, understand how to implement mutex locks to serialize cache updates, and discover advanced techniques like staggered TTL expiration and background cache warming. This system design interview tutorial covers real-world scenarios, best practices for distributed caching systems using Redis and Memcached, and practical code examples to help you prevent cache stampede problems in production environments.