Interesting! Reading the headline before the article, my brain immediately thought of "jitter".

I wonder if you could extend the `In-process synchronization` example so that when `CompleteableFuture.supplyAsync()` thunk first does a random sleep (where the sleep time is bounded by an informed value based on the expensive query execution time), then it checks the cache again, and only if the cache is still empty does it proceed with the rest of the example code.

That way you (stochastically) get some of the benefits of distributed locking w/o actually having to do distributed locking.

Of course that only works if you are ok adding in a bit of extra latency (which should be ok; you're already on the non-hot path), and that there still may be more than 1 query issued to fill the cache.