Lamport timestamps

From Jzhao, relates to Happens before

Track logical time rather than actual wall time, meaning we count number of events that have occurred rather than seconds elapsed. This timestamp is just a simple counter.

All nodes start their counter at 0

• Every time we perform an operation locally, we increment our counter by one
• Every time we broadcast a message to our peers, we attach this counter
• Every time we receive a message, we set our timer to max(self.seq, incoming.seq) + 1 If a.seq > b.seq then event a must have happened after event b. However, if a.seq == b.seq, we cannot be sure which event came first. This means that Lamport timestamps only give us a partial ordering, which means two identical sequence numbers might not correspond to the same unique event.

algorithm