Time here is on a per-node basis. No effort is made to synchronize time over multiple nodes. Partially because the problem is better solved with NTP, partially

Time here is on a per-node basis. No effort is made to synchronize time over multiple nodes. Partially because the problem is better solved with NTP, partially because time synchronization is so application-specific you don't want to solve it generically. Some problems can do away with pretty lax sync, which in turn yields faster execution due to more asynchronicity. Other problems requires global time keeping, or timestamps of the form {erlang:monotonic_time(), node()} where the node-name is part of the timestamp (tuple ordering is lexicographic). There are already several solutions to the global time problem. Twitter does something in Finagle, and earlier it was snowflake.