When should I use uuid.uuid1() vs. uuid.uuid4() in python?

Question

uuid1() is guaranteed to not produce any collisions (under the assumption you do not create too many of them at the same time). I wouldn't use it if it's important that there's no connection between the uuid and the computer, as the mac address gets used to make it unique across computers.

You can create duplicates by creating more than 2¹⁴ uuid1 in less than 100ns, but this is not a problem for most use cases.

uuid4() generates, as you said, a random UUID. The chance of a collision is really, really, really small. Small enough, that you shouldn't worry about it. The problem is, that a bad random-number generator makes it more likely to have collisions.

This excellent answer by Bob Aman sums it up nicely. (I recommend reading the whole answer.)

Frankly, in a single application space without malicious actors, the extinction of all life on earth will occur long before you have a collision, even on a version 4 UUID, even if you're generating quite a few UUIDs per second.

One instance when you may consider uuid1() rather than uuid4() is when UUIDs are produced on separate machines, for example when multiple online transactions are process on several machines for scaling purposes.

In such a situation, the risks of having collisions due to poor choices in the way the pseudo-random number generators are initialized, for example, and also the potentially higher numbers of UUIDs produced render more likely the possibility of creating duplicate IDs.

Another interest of uuid1(), in that case is that the machine where each GUID was initially produced is implicitly recorded (in the "node" part of UUID). This and the time info, may help if only with debugging.

My team just ran into trouble using UUID1 for a database upgrade script where we generated ~120k UUIDs within a couple of minutes. The UUID collision led to violation of a primary key constraint.

We've upgraded 100s of servers but on our Amazon EC2 instances we ran into this issue a few times. I suspect poor clock resolution and switching to UUID4 solved it for us.

One thing to note when using uuid1, if you use the default call (without giving clock_seq parameter) you have a chance of running into collisions: you have only 14 bit of randomness (generating 18 entries within 100ns gives you roughly 1% chance of a collision see birthday paradox/attack). The problem will never occur in most use cases, but on a virtual machine with poor clock resolution it will bite you.

Perhaps something that's not been mentioned is that of locality.

A MAC address or time-based ordering (UUID1) can afford increased database performance, since it's less work to sort numbers closer-together than those distributed randomly (UUID4) (see here).

A second related issue, is that using UUID1 can be useful in debugging, even if origin data is lost or not explicitly stored (this is obviously in conflict with the privacy issue mentioned by the OP).

In addition to the accepted answer, there's a third option that can be useful in some cases:

v1 with random MAC ("v1mc")

You can make a hybrid between v1 & v4 by deliberately generating v1 UUIDs with a random broadcast MAC address (this is allowed by the v1 spec). The resulting v1 UUID is time dependant (like regular v1), but lacks all host-specific information (like v4). It's also much closer to v4 in it's collision-resistance: v1mc = 60 bits of time + 61 random bits = 121 unique bits; v4 = 122 random bits.

First place I encountered this was Postgres' uuid_generate_v1mc() function. I've since used the following python equivalent:

from os import urandom
from uuid import uuid1
_int_from_bytes = int.from_bytes  # py3 only

def uuid1mc():
    # NOTE: The constant here is required by the UUIDv1 spec...
    return uuid1(_int_from_bytes(urandom(6), "big") | 0x010000000000)

(note: I've got a longer + faster version that creates the UUID object directly; can post if anyone wants)

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In case of LARGE volumes of calls/second, this has the potential to exhaust system randomness. You could use the stdlib random module instead (it will probably also be faster). But BE WARNED: it only takes a few hundred UUIDs before an attacker can determine the RNG state, and thus partially predict future UUIDs.

import random
from uuid import uuid1

def uuid1mc_insecure():
    return uuid1(random.getrandbits(48) | 0x010000000000)