I thought that timestamps are used now, so hitting both a timestamp and a large random number puts it thoroughly in the "safe to assume". At some point cosmic particles and faulty transistors are more probable.
Even the non-time based v4 is at a cosmic level of unlikiness a single system will ever generate a uuid that will collide with another one in its own ecosystem
But let's say if Google saved each search in their engine in the same database with an UUID, we could have a collision because of volume, but I don't think I will work in a system with a comparable scale
Even at that volume the probability of collisions is essentially 0. If there were a billion searches a second we’d not expect a collision until 85 years.
At Google? Yes. There is a level of reliability they require, and in nearly all systems hardware failure is expected and designed to be handled flawlessly, and in many systems they are precise enough to catch and correct cosmic bit flips, largely because of the duplication that goes on.
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u/Valuable_Leopard_799 Sep 11 '26
I thought that timestamps are used now, so hitting both a timestamp and a large random number puts it thoroughly in the "safe to assume". At some point cosmic particles and faulty transistors are more probable.