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This paper that improves clock synchronization accuracy to tens of nanoseconds is amazing work.

What changes with that level of accuracy? Like the paper says, Spanner commit times get a lot shorter. But is it now safe to take action without coordination?

usenix.org/system/files/c…
One of the classic examples is leader failover: when is it safe for a replica to start serving? We only have to wait to be sure the original leader had realised it’s stopped getting heartbeats. So theoretically a tighter clock sync makes that wait time shorter. But...
my guess is that other factors, like scheduling delays, dominate in this case and contribute to potentially significant variance before a leader realizes what’s up. Putting the clock check on the critical path mitigates this at the expense of lots of clock checks.
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