Jan 4 · 6 min read · Distributed systems force engineers to confront an uncomfortable fact: time is unreliable. On a single machine, time.Now() feels good enough. Across regions, networks, and failure modes, it quickly becomes a source of subtle, expensive bugs. This po...
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Dec 11, 2025 · 2 min read · Time, clocks and the ordering of events in a distributed systemL. Lamport, Communications ACM 1978 SummaryThe paper introduces the happened-before relation and logical clocks to define a consistent partial ordering of events in a distributed system. ...
Join discussionJun 28, 2025 · 6 min read · Imagine a world where "before" and "after" aren't always clear. This isn't a philosophical musing, but a very real problem in distributed systems networks of independent computers that communicate by sending messages. When each computer has its own c...
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Mar 19, 2023 · 12 min read · Distributed systems are used in various applications ranging from e-commerce websites to large-scale data processing applications. A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that communicate and coordinate with each other to achie...
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Oct 7, 2022 · 5 min read · What is an NTP server? In a network of computers, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock timings. Computer clock timings are synchronized to a millisecond, and occasionally to a fraction of a millisec...
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Jul 21, 2022 · 3 min read · Why do we need logical clocks? The concept of time is fundamental to our way of thinking about ordering of events in a system. Since physical clocks in a distributed system can drift among each other, it will be very difficult to enforce total orderi...
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