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Hybrid Logical Clocks Explained for System Design Interviews
Last Updated: January 5, 2026
Ashish Pratap Singh
9 min read
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Hybrid Logical Clocks Explained for System Design ...
1. The Problem of Time in Distributed Systems
1.1 Why This Matters
2. Physical Clocks and Their Limitations
2.1 How NTP Works
2.2 Problems with Physical Clocks
3. Logical Clocks: Lamport and Vector Clocks
3.1 Lamport Clocks
3.2 Vector Clocks
4. Hybrid Logical Clocks: The Best of Both Worlds...
4.1 The Core Idea
4.2 Key Insight
5. The HLC Algorithm
5.1 Initialization
5.2 Local Event or Send
5.3 Receive Event
5.4 Example Walkthrough
6. HLC Properties and Guarantees
6.1 Causality Preservation
6.2 Bounded Divergence from Physical Time
6.3 Constant Space
6.4 NTP Compatibility
6.5 Monotonicity
7. Real-World Implementations
7.1 CockroachDB
7.2 MongoDB
7.3 TiDB
7.4 Comparison of Implementations
8. When to Use HLC
8.1 Good Use Cases
8.2 When HLC Might Not Be Needed
8.3 HLC vs Alternatives
9. Common Interview Questions
9.1 Conceptual Questions
9.2 Design Questions
9.3 Quick Reference
Summary
References
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Course Introduction
