Skip to Main Content
Patterns of Distributed Systems
book

Patterns of Distributed Systems

by Unmesh Joshi
December 2023
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
464 pages
12h 35m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Patterns of Distributed Systems

Chapter 22

Lamport Clock

Use logical timestamps as a version for a value to allow ordering of values across servers.

Problem

When values are stored across multiple servers, there needs to be a way to know which values were stored before the other. The system timestamp cannot be used, because they are not monotonic, as discussed in the sidebar “Wall Clocks Are Not Monotonic” of the Lease pattern, and clock values from two different servers should not be compared.

The system timestamp, which represents the time of the day, is measured by clock machinery generally built with a crystal oscillator. The known problem with this mechanism is that it can drift away from the actual time of the day. To fix this, computers typically have a service such ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Designing Distributed Systems

Designing Distributed Systems

Brendan Burns