>Maybe I'm missing something you've already explained, but what if new hit(s) come in during your timeout period?

The first hit of the worker process gets the lock. The others go in pending queue until the lock is released. Once released, the others will go in and will skip it immediately as the flag for the reloading would be completed. This is the same logic as when starting the application. The first hit of each of worker process gets a lock to load the data dictionary, thus everything in regards to the oApp shared object. Then, the upcoming hits can benefit from it.