Thundering herd problem
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The thundering herd problem occurs in a situation when a number of processes waiting for an event wake up when the event occurs, and only one process is allowed to continue. After the processes woke up, a decision has to be made which process should continue. All other processes start waiting again. This occurs repeatedly, untill there are no more processes to be woken up.
This may render the computer unusable, but it can also be used as a technique if there is no other way to decide which process should continue (for example when programming with semaphores).
Though the phrase is mostly used in computer science, it could be an abstraction of the observation seen when cattle is released from a shed or when wildebeests are crossing the Mara River. In both instances, the movement is suboptimal.
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