Have you ever worked on something, then once you got it done you were told it wasn’t needed anymore? Distributed systems feel like that all the time. Clients give us work, then time out, or wander off, and the work still gets done. One solution to this problem is to give each piece of work a Time To Live (TTL), where each item of work is marked with an expiry time. “If you’re still working on this after twelve thirty, don’t bother finishing it because I won’t be waiting anymore”. TTLs have traditionally been implemented using relative time (in 10 seconds, or in steps as with IP) rather than absolute time (until 09:54:10 UTC) because comparing absolute times across machines is risky. The downside of the relative approach is that everybody needs to measure the time taken and remember to decrease the TTL, which adds complexity. High quality clocks fix the drift problem, and allow us to use absolute time TTLs.
Cache TTLs can also be based on absolute time, and the ability to accurately compare absolute time across machines allows caches to more easily implement patterns like bounded staleness.
