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Vector clock
Algorithm for partial ordering of events and detecting causality in distributed systems / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Not to be confused with Version vector.
A vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations. Just as in Lamport timestamps, inter-process messages contain the state of the sending process's logical clock. A vector clock of a system of N processes is an array/vector of N logical clocks, one clock per process; a local "largest possible values" copy of the global clock-array is kept in each process.
Denote as the vector clock maintained by process
, the clock updates proceed as follows:[1]
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Vector_Clock.svg/640px-Vector_Clock.svg.png)
- Initially all clocks are zero.
- Each time a process experiences an internal event, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one. For instance, upon an event at process
, it updates
.
- Each time a process sends a message, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one (as in the bullet above, but not twice for the same event) then it pairs the message with a copy of its own vector and finally sends the pair.
- Each time a process receives a message-vector clock pair, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one and updates each element in its vector by taking the maximum of the value in its own vector clock and the value in the vector in the received pair (for every element). For example, if process
receives a message
from
, it first increments its own logical clock in the vector by one
and then updates its entire vector by setting
.