@drscriptt @SteveBellovin @mattblaze @hzulla It's not about randomizing, really, just spreading. It's OK if several systems hit at the same time, just not the whole head.

@SteveBellovin @mattblaze @hzulla In the late 1990s I worked at a place that had a hundred or so systems all using the same file server. We used a simple wrapper for cron jobs run by all systems to smear out the impact: extract low octet of IP address, sleep that many seconds before starting.

Nowadays I manage about 300 systems, but net and CPU and storage are fast enough that we don't get crowd-load effects. If we did I'd repeat the scheme but sleep N/10 or N/100 seconds.

There's something to be said for changing cron to insert small random delays. I don't think it often (if ever) matters if a job starts a fraction of a second, or even a few seconds, after the exact start of the minute.

@jensorensen Broccoli is good for platelet generation too!

@AbandonedAmerica Now I'm imagining the Rotting Room, where prisoners are left to rot. Trumpcamps are full of them.