Was going to post this. "Sharding" seems like a better term for communicating the idea.

I dunno - "sharding" would generally imply (to me, at least) that you're spreading the counters amongst different databases (or tables in a smaller context.) All the counters are in the same table here which is counterintuitive to "sharding".

Semantics

Also, it's basically identical to the pattern described as Counter Tables in "High Performance MySQL" (3rd edition), published in 2012.

Indeed, it also calls them "slots":

> You can get higher concurrency by keeping more than one row and updating a random row... just choose a random slot and update it

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/high-performance-mysql/...