jargon

Backend & systems·Concurrency and coordination

the bug only shows up under load, never in tests, and the outcome depends on which of two threads got there first.

Race condition

A defect where the result depends on the unpredictable relative timing of concurrent operations. The signature is irreproducibility: it happens once every ten thousand requests and never in a debugger. Most are read-modify-write sequences that need to be atomic and are not.

Commonly confused with