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How to make things slower so they go faster
Synchronized demand is the moment a large cohort of clients acts almost together. In a service with capacity $\mu$ requests per second and background load $\lambda_0$, the usable headroom is $H = \mu - \lambda_0 > 0$. When $M$ clients align—after a cache expiry, at a cron boundary, or
Induced alignment comes from state transitions—deployments and restarts, leader elections, circuit‑breaker reopenings, cache flushes, token refreshes, and rate‑limit windows that reset simultaneously. In steady state, the goal is to prevent cohorts from forming or acting in sync: randomize TTLs, splay periodic work, de‑synchronize health checks and timers, and use jittered backoff for retries while honoring server hints. The common errors are predictable: understating $M$; overstating $H$; ignoring service‑time tails so connection pools fail first; and forgetting that new arrivals reduce headroom available to a backlog.
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