zlacker

>>pharkm+(OP)
Distributed systems design aside, the core of the problem is that they relied on ntp (as they probably should), and in their case ntp was not working properly.

>>flavie+t2
Even if NTP had been working properly, you would not have clocks synchronised at the level of individual ticks - only to the level of time intervals. If two updates happened at roughly the same time, and fell into the same time interval, there would be no way to tell which one happened before the other. A paper by Cilia et al on timing of composite events in distributed event-based systems using NTP deals with this issue.

>>global+or
But this is not a problem in many situations. Whereas successor writes failing within an entire 30 second span is a pretty big problem.