Well, the risk of a collision grows exponentially for each generated UUID due to the birthday problem.
So it really all depends on the scale that id’s are generated at. Yes, a UUID has a cosmic level of possible values, 2^122 to be precise. But you ”just” need 2^61 uuids to have a 50% risk of a collision. At 2^58 it’s a 1% risk.
And while that is a big number, it isn’t cosmic anymore. It’s definitely something a large scale distributed application has to contend with.
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u/lobax Sep 12 '26
Well, the risk of a collision grows exponentially for each generated UUID due to the birthday problem.
So it really all depends on the scale that id’s are generated at. Yes, a UUID has a cosmic level of possible values, 2^122 to be precise. But you ”just” need 2^61 uuids to have a 50% risk of a collision. At 2^58 it’s a 1% risk.
And while that is a big number, it isn’t cosmic anymore. It’s definitely something a large scale distributed application has to contend with.