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Logs gathered from several machines can place an effect before its cause, which makes tracing a problem much harder.
Distributed logs can show an effect before its cause due to clock skew, complicating debugging. ✦ AI generated
Author · ByteByteGo Newsletter · 2026-07-23 · original ↗
Logs gathered from several machines can place an effect before its cause, which makes tracing a problem much harder.
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Each machine can read time from its own hardware clock, but those clocks do not stay aligned. Network Time Protocol (NTP) tries to bring the clocks together, but it cannot eliminate the problem.Author · ByteByteGo Newsletter · conf 90%On a single computer, every event can be measured against one clock, so the order of the events is never in doubt. However, a distributed system, where work is spread across many independent machines, lacks a shared reference.Author · ByteByteGo Newsletter · conf 85%If events on different machines are ordered by comparing timestamps, a small difference in the wrong direction can change the result.Author · ByteByteGo Newsletter · conf 85%