A logical clock mechanism has been developed for maintaining the partial ordering of events in distributed systems. The mechanism handles events in an ad hoc way and its comparison rule is not quite simple. Two major improvements on the mechanism are presented. General maintenance rules are developed to handle various kinds of interprocess events, and the comparison rule is simplified by maintaining the clocks with a new technique called two-phase update. These improvements make the logical clock mechanism more general and efficient for supporting distributed system development.
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