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Data Systems⚪New

🧩 The Unreliable Network

The assumption that in a distributed system, packets will be lost, clocks will drift, and nodes will pause.

⬇️ Foundation

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Unreliable Clocks

The difficulty of ordering events in a distributed system due to clock drift.

Process Pauses

Stop-the-world events (like Garbage Collection) that cause a node to stop responding for seconds.

🎯 Mastery Criteria

✔Student can explain why we cannot distinguish between a slow network and a dead node.
🤔 Reflection:
"How does the unreliability of clocks affect our ability to resolve conflicts using timestamps (Last Write Wins)?"

⚠️ Common Trap

Timeouts are reliable failure detectors.