Why Vector Clocks Are Hard | Basho Technologies

Why Vector Clocks Are Hard | Basho Technologies

April 5, 2010 A couple of months ago,  Bryan wrote about vector clocks  on this blog. The title of the post was "Why Vector Clocks are Easy"; anyone who read the post would realize that he meant that they're easy for a client to use when talking to a system that implements them. For that reason, there is no reason to fear or avoid using a service that exposes the existence of vector clocks in its API. Of course, actually implementing such a system is not easy. Two of the hardest things are deciding what  an actor is (i.e. where the incrementing and resolution is, and what parties get their own field in the vector) and how to keep vclocks from growing without bound over time. In Bryan's example the parties that actually proposed changes ("clients") were the actors in the vector clocks. This is the model that vector clocks are designed for and work well with, but it has a drawback. The width of the vectors will grow proportionally with the number of clients.

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