Your cache hit rate can be 99% and your database can still fall over. I got reminded of this during a load test recently: the dashboard showed a wall of cache hits, and yet the database briefly lit up with a burst of identical queries. Same key, same query, fifty times, all inside a couple hundred milliseconds. That burst has a name, cache stampede, and the annoying part is that the standard IMemoryCache pattern we all write does nothing to stop it. So I built a small demo to catch it in th...