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Glossary

Amortized analysis
A worst-sequence bound averaged per operation, without a probability model.
Auxiliary space
Peak additional memory used by an algorithm, excluding input and output under this site's convention.
Backpressure
A protocol by which a slower consumer constrains a faster producer rather than allowing work to accumulate without bound. See resilience controls.
Cache stampede
A burst of concurrent reloads for the same missing or expired cached value. See application caching.
Data race
Conflicting accesses not ordered as required by the language memory model, at least one of which is a write.
Idempotent operation
An operation whose intended effect is unchanged when the same operation is applied multiple times. See idempotency and deduplication.
Invariant
A property preserved at a defined point throughout an algorithm or object's valid lifetime.
Linearizability
A concurrent consistency condition in which each operation appears to take effect atomically between invocation and response while respecting real-time order.
Liveness
A property asserting that a desired event eventually occurs.
Memoization
Reuse of a function result for an equivalent input, usually to avoid repeated evaluation of overlapping subproblems. See memoization.
N+1 query problem
One query for parent results followed by one additional query per parent for related data. See query optimization.
Race condition
A defect or behavior whose result depends on relative timing; broader than a language-level data race.
Stable sort
A sort that preserves the relative order of elements whose keys compare equal.
Safety
A property asserting that an invalid state or event never occurs.
Transactional outbox
A pattern that commits business state and a publishable record in one local transaction, then relays that record asynchronously. See the transactional outbox guide.
Work and span
Sequential work and the longest dependency path of a parallel computation.