[abrookewood]

This is the bit I found curious: "adding a small amount of random latency to requests to storage servers counter-intuitively reduced the average latency and the outliers due to the smoothing effect it has on the network".

Can anyone explain why?

[wmf]

Synchronized network traffic can cause incast or other buffer overflows.

[refibrillator]

Yeah jitter is generally used to mitigate “thundering herd” type problems because it reduces the peak load by spreading it out over time.

[abrookewood]

Thanks to both of you - makes sense