Timestamps produced by a Lamport clock take the least amount of space, O(1) in terms of the number of nodes in the system, compared to other clock designs. A Lamport timestamp captures the event id and some history of events the node is aware of at the time the event is generated, all using a single unique number. When a node generated event id [ 5 ], the node claims to have knowledge of some event that is numbered [ 4 ] and no knowledge of any other event that is numbered [ 5 ] or above.
Clocks and Causality - Ordering Events in Distributed Systems
from Giridhar Manepalli
