Code RoomCache stampede on aligned expiry
MediumPrep Room Coding #2410

Cache stampede on aligned expiry

On-callReliability & on-callMid–Senior~30 min

At 18:00 exactly, every minute on the minute, your homepage feed service spikes: Redis cache-hit ratio briefly craters, the Postgres origin sees a burst of identical heavy 'trending posts' queries, p99 latency triples for ~10 seconds, then recovers. This started after yesterday's deploy that introduced a 'trending' module cached with a 60-second TTL and a fixed expiry aligned to the wall clock. How do you triage and fix this?

What a strong answer looks like

Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.

0:00 of about 30 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.