my go-to ways to avoid the thundering herd prob are, well, depends on the situation but usually, i try to get in early

So, I've run into a bit of a problem. When a bunch of requests come in at the same time for something that takes a lot of time and effort to get, the system can get totally swamped. I'm wondering what everyone else does to handle this. Are you using things like distributed locks, or maybe cache stampede strategies? Or perhaps you have a totally different way of doing things? I'm really eager to hear about what works for you and what you like best.