Why do vector clocks grow in size as clusters scale?
A vector clock has one counter per node in the cluster. A 100-node cluster carries 100 integers per event. This becomes expensive in network traffic, storage, and memory. Solutions include interval tree clocks and version-vector pruning to drop stale entries.
Answered in
Vector Clocks: Detecting Causality in Distributed SystemsVector clocks solve distributed ordering: when wall-clock timestamps fail to detect concurrent writes, vector clocks reveal true causality and conflicts.
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