Lamport Timestamp
A simple logical clock where each event increments a counter. If event A causes event B, A's timestamp is always less than B's. The foundation of logical time in distributed systems.
What is Lamport Timestamp?
A simple logical clock where each event increments a counter. If event A causes event B, A's timestamp is always less than B's. The foundation of logical time in distributed systems.
Lamport Timestamp is a advanced concept that sits in the Distributed Systems Core area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Lamport Timestamp" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Vector Clock
A logical clock that tracks causality across distributed nodes using a vector of counters. Each node increments its own counter and merges vectors on message receipt.
Consensus
The process of getting multiple nodes in a distributed system to agree on a single value. The foundation of distributed databases and coordination services.
Gossip Protocol
A peer-to-peer communication protocol where nodes share information with random neighbors, spreading it like gossip. Used for cluster membership and failure detection.