I initially heard of "thundering herd" in reference to the pattern where a server handling N requests for the same data may only need to run the data handling l

I initially heard of "thundering herd" in reference to the pattern where a server handling N requests for the same data may only need to run the data handling logic once to fulfill all of those requests. For example, if I have a server with an endpoint that needs to make a request to a different service for some data, I don't want to make that request 10 times when my server receives 10 requests while the first request is being handled; all 10 of those incoming requests can be fulfilled by 1 outgoing request to the secondary service. In that sense, it's very similar to what you described, but it's still likely one process handling the requests. I'll admit that the author seemed to use "thundering herd" in reference to your server just suddenly receiving a lot of traffic, which is also different from the usage I was familiar with.