On: Why Vector Clocks are Easy

[evgen]

Lamport timestamps sync events between two systems, vector clocks extend the sync to N systems by using an array of these logical timestamps.

[mbrubeck → evgen]

That's not true. Lamport clocks work across any number of nodes/processes. The figures in Lamport's paper all show examples using three processes:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:IJxXjuFmdHEJ:c...

[justinsheehy → mbrubeck]

Lamport's logical clocks work across multiple nodes, but they can lose information about causality.

Hence Mattern's extensions to Lamport's work, which introduce the idea of vector clocks.