alt Hacker NewsMy bad. I misread it. Delaying the start like that does divide the thundering herd peak by 60. The point about c Rand stands.
The other thing to watch out for is you’ve still got 1/60 of the thundering herd at the second level. If the tasks are <1s and you have enough of them (as you probably do at grid scale), then doing it finer grained is warranted like offsetting the timer by a millisecond sleep of 10 * uniform_distribution<int> between 0 and 6000. That then gives you 10ms granularity, distributing the workload by two more orders of magnitude.
I almost wrote 59.999 seconds too, but I figured someone would nitpick that the timing often won't be that accurate or will get coalesced. ;)
I should have said, you almost always want to use the randomly staggered timers on initialization, not just when the exact timer interval matters! It's also important to test electricity or backend outages, which can unintentionally synchronize all the timers.