What are Snowflake IDs

Snowflake IDs, also known as snowflakes, are a type of unique identifier used in distributed computing to create time-ordered IDs.

Twitter (now X) created the format and uses it for tweet IDs, but other companies, such as Discord, Instagram, and Mastodon, have also adopted it

How they are unique

Snowflake IDs are made up of multiple components, including:

• Timestamp
  • The current time in milliseconds, which ensures that IDs generated at different nodes are roughly ordered.
• Node identifier
  • A unique identifier for the node (machine or server) generating the ID, which helps prevent collisions in distributed systems.
• Sequence number
  • A counter that starts at 0 and increments with each ID generated, which resolves conflicts when multiple IDs are generated at the same timestamp

Snowflake IDs are 64-bit long unsigned integers, which provides a large space for unique identifiers. With default settings, a snowflake generator can generate up to 4,096 unique IDs per millisecond, which is the maximum that the format supports