I guess this is a pretty fundamental question that could therefore go in general, but… So the scheduler takes intervals from the queries and get splayed out if the counters for multiple land around the same time client-side. That statement is enough of a roller-coaster to say I can't defend the server from a thundering herd, it's all local and something called an epoch is supposed to be the only visibility server-side as to when intervals all started, but that's a timestamp and not unix 1970-whenever