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Timestamping (computing)

Event metadata

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated May 13, 2026

In computing, timestamping refers to the use of an electronic timestamp to provide a temporal order among a set of events.

Timestamping techniques are used in a variety of computing fields, from network management and computer security to concurrency control. For instance, a heartbeat network uses timestamping to monitor the nodes on a high availability computer cluster.

Timestamping computer files (updating the timestamp in the per-file metadata every time a file is modified) makes it possible to use efficient build automation tools.

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This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Timestamping (computing)”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Trusted timestamping

Trusted timestamping is the process of securely keeping track of the creation and modification time of a document. Security here means that no one, not even the owner of the document, should be able to change it once it has been recorded provided that the timestamper's integrity is never compromised.

Timestamp-based concurrency control

In computer science, a timestamp-based concurrency control algorithm is a optimistic concurrency control method. It is used in some databases to safely handle transactions using timestamps for synchronization instead of locks.

Lamport timestamp

The Lamport timestamp algorithm is a simple logical clock algorithm used to determine the order of events in a distributed computer system. As different nodes or processes will typically not be perfectly synchronized, this algorithm is used to provide a partial ordering of events with minimal overhead, and conceptually provide a starting point for the more advanced vector clock method.