4 ms·
What are the practical issues with potentially being wrong for one day by at most one second?
by staticassertion 4y ago
What are the practical issues with potentially being wrong for one day by at most one second?
- a9h74j 4y agoI assume finance and control systems to start. I might be helpful to have a fallback time-ordering algorithm not dependent upon one monotonic clock, but then you might have a rarely-used fallback to have bugs in, I imagine.
- Too 4y agoWhat are the practical issues for finance and control systems?
- denton-scratch 4y agoFor finance, it matters what order events occur in. I've never messed with control systems, but I suppose similar issues arise.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoOrdering can be solved by a mutex.
- ncmncm 4y ago
- a9h74j 4y agoI was thinking of more distributed control systems, particularly where testing for edge cases might be difficult and rare, and rigorous methods (did Lamport solve distributed mutex?) are probably off the radar in terms of culture.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoAny forum is a distributed system of a server and clients that agree with each other on order of user posts.
- Too 4y agoControl systems, or any form of embedded safety critical system, use monotonic clocks where calendar time is a complete non-issue. Ordering of events, on what scale are we talking here? If it’s just within a transactional database there are multitude of ways to do it. Even distributed dbs have such features without relying on perfect time. If you are looking at a spanner style db you need a lot more guarantees than “I just used the time my cloud provider assigned to my vm”, plus being in sync only matters within your own cluster?