{
  "slug": "persistence-ordering",
  "term": "Persistence ordering",
  "aliases": [
    "persist ordering"
  ],
  "definition": "Persistence ordering is a constraint on the order in which updates become durable, rather than merely the order in which an application issues them.",
  "note": "Pillai et al. distinguish ordering from atomicity: individually indivisible updates can still reach storage in an unsafe order. Review the application's recovery dependencies, not only the syscall trace. Historical filesystem configurations are evidence of variation, not guarantees about every current implementation.",
  "status": "shipping",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-10-11",
  "related": [
    "crash-consistency",
    "fsync",
    "directory-fsync",
    "write-back-cache"
  ],
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "pillai",
      "title": "Pillai, Chidambaram, Alagappan, Al-Kiswany, Arpaci-Dusseau and Arpaci-Dusseau. All File Systems Are Not Created Equal: On the Complexity of Crafting Crash-Consistent Applications. OSDI 2014, pp. 433-448, sections 2 and 4.4.",
      "url": "https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14-paper-pillai.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-11"
    },
    {
      "id": "hesela-rename",
      "title": "Hesela: Atomic rename is not a durable commit",
      "url": "https://hesela.com/analyses/atomic-rename-directory-durability/",
      "accessed": "2026-10-11"
    }
  ]
}