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Home > Synchronization


Synchronization is coordination with respect to time. It is an important concept in the following fields:

Synchronization has several subtly distinct sub-concepts:

Two different time sequences may be synchronized in one sense without being synchronised in another, or synchronised at one time scale whilst being asynchronous in another.

Systems operating with all their parts in synchrony are said to be synchronous. Some systems may be only approximately synchronised, or plesiochronous.

For some applications relative offsets between events need to be determined, for others only the order of the event is important. The idea of simultaneity has many difficulties, both in practice and theory.

1 Some uses of synchronization

Whilst well-designed time synchronization is an important tool for creating reliable systems, excessive use of synchronization where it is not necessary can make systems less fault-tolerant, and hence less reliable.



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