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[return to "Clocks Are Bad, Or, Welcome to the World of Distributed Systems"]
1. dustin+A6[view] [source] 2013-11-13 01:52:39
>>pharkm+(OP)
I don't get how clocks are bad this from the article.

I get that syncing clocks across systems is hard and when it goes awry, unintended consequences are incurred.

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2. RickHu+29[view] [source] 2013-11-13 02:35:06
>>dustin+A6
There is, in fact, a TL;DR at the end:

> If your distributed database relies on clocks to pick a winner, you’d better have rock-solid time synchronization, and even then, it’s unlikely your business needs are served well by blindly selecting the last write that happens to arrive.

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3. ssever+rj[view] [source] 2013-11-13 05:53:41
>>RickHu+29
In fact I would recommend GPS calibrated hardware clocks with PTP.
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4. marshr+ax[view] [source] 2013-11-13 11:10:50
>>ssever+rj
The point is not that time synchronization is inherently bad, only that it's usually not the correct thing for a distributed database to resolve update conflicts with.
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5. ssever+Z01[view] [source] 2013-11-13 16:33:13
>>marshr+ax
Yes I completely agree. I fail to see how anyone would think that using a clock as a source of truth in a distributed system would be in anyway a good idea. As far as PTP it would be too expensive to deploy at large scale which was some of the motivation (i believe) behind truetime.
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6. marshr+e61[view] [source] 2013-11-13 17:17:02
>>ssever+Z01
To be fair, time was considered to provide a pretty universal total ordering up until fairly recently, i.e., 1903.
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