Issues in Distributed Systems (4): working with time issues
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Introduction
Some distributed systems may rely on node clocks to be synchronized to function. It is easy for unsynchronized clocks or misconfigured NTP clients to go undetected for long periods of time, since a drifting clock is unlikely to cause a system crash but a subtle and gradual data loss. For systems that must work with synchronized clocks, it is important that a check is kept on the offset of clocks for all nodes in a cluster. If any one of the clocks drifts too far away from the rest of clocks in the system, then the node with the offending clock should be considered dead and removed from the cluster.
To see how clocks in a distributed system can cause data loss, we’ll work through an example of a database that is written to by multiple clients and the strategy used to handle conflicts is last write wins. The node in the database that receives the…
