Logical clock

A logical clock is a mechanism for capturing chronological and causal relationships in a distributed system.

Logical clock algorithms of note are:

• Lamport timestamps, which are monotonically increasing software counters.
• Vector clocks, that allow for total ordering of events in a distributed system.
• Version vectors, order replicas, according to updates, in an optimistic replicated system.
• Matrix clocks, an extension of vector clocks that also contains information about other processes' views of the system.