zlacker

Hmm, I was thinking it still applies in the sense that the many many duplicate retries are hitting many of Twitter's servers causing unnecessary duplicated load when a single successful response would satisfy the client and reduce the traffic.

In my mind, it is much closer to needlessly asking every server for the same information because the requests are most likely load balanced, but I guess it's true that I don't know the load balancing strategy. Even still, is it not more likely than not that those retries are hitting multiple servers?

>>jayd16+(OP)
Sure, maybe? We (or at least I) know little about the actual problem here, and metaphors only go so far. But to my mind, "too many things trying to handle a request" gets a cool name because it is a fairly narrow and unusual problem, whereas "too many requests" goes by many names (DoS, hammering, flood, etc) because it's depressingly common.