How to Make Things Slower So They Go Faster

Summary

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 as a service returns from an outage—the bucketed arrival rate can exceed $H$ by large factors. Queues form, timeouts propagate, retries synchronize, and a minor disturbance becomes a major incident. The task is to prevent such peaks when possible and to drain safely when they occur, with mechanisms that are fair to clients and disciplined about capacity.The phenomenon has simple origins. Natural alignment comes from clocks and defaults—crons on the minute, hour‑aligned TTLs, SDK timers, people starting work at the same time. 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. Adversarial and accidental alignment includes DDoS and flash crowds. In each case the system faces a coherent cohort that would be harmless if spread over time but is dangerous when synchronized.How failure unfolds depends on which constraint binds first. Queueing delay grows as utilization approaches one, yet many resources have hard limits: connection pools, file descriptors, threads. Crossing those limits produces cliff behavior—one more connection request forces timeouts and then retries, which raise arrivals further. A narrow spike can exhaust connections long before CPU is saturated; a wider plateau can saturate CPU or bandwidth. Feedback tightens the spiral: errors beget retries, retries beget more errors. Whether work is online or offline matters, too. When a user is waiting, added delay is costly and fairness across requests matters; when no user is waiting, buffering is acceptable and the objective becomes sustained throughput.A useful way to reason about mi...