Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

computerworlduk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#21

Post by _stephan »

DrJokepu wrote: post #18
alphabeat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it was the OS from memory. This was around the time Accenture lead development wasn't working out a few years ago.

I would be really surprised if it was the fault of the OS. I mean, Windows can be really fast, in the right hands, especially since they've introduced HTTP.SYS (parts of the HTTP server now run in kernel level). However, .NET being a garbage-collected, managed and JITted environemnt, it is maybe not the best tool for achieving these kind of response times reliably. Any serious and competent .NET developer would admit…

Are they actually using HTTP for anything?

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#22

Post by danielnicollet »

lrm242 wrote: post #6

World record? Not quite. Let's see full details on the numbers. NASDAQ publishes their latency numbers weekly, including average, 99th percentile, and 99.9th percentile: http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet . Their average latency on order entry is 98 microseconds and their average latency on market data is 92 microseconds. Perhaps by "world record" they mean "european record".

True but this is like the "World Series" for stock trading latency. Who really plays baseball other than the US and small group of other countries like Cuba ;-)

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#23

Post by DrJokepu »

_stephan wrote: post #21
DrJokepu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be really surprised if it was the fault of the OS. I mean, Windows can be really fast, in the right hands, especially since they've introduced HTTP.SYS (parts of the HTTP server now run in kernel level). However, .NET being a garbage-collected, managed and JITted environemnt, it is maybe not the best tool for achieving these kind of response times reliably. Any serious and competent .NET developer would admit…

Are they actually using HTTP for anything?

I have absolutely no idea.

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#24

Post by siculars »

If I were a critical systems operator like say, a stock exchange, I would have to have my head examined by a team of head examiners for even considering Windows as an acceptable OS platform.

Honestly, is the reason Microsoft can even get consideration for these projects because there are so many tech executives at major corporations who used to be Microsofties?

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#25

Post by recoiledsnake »

siculars wrote: post #24

If I were a critical systems operator like say, a stock exchange, I would have to have my head examined by a team of head examiners for even considering Windows as an acceptable OS platform. Honestly, is the reason Microsoft can even get consideration for these projects because there are so many tech executives at major corporations who used to be Microsofties?

That makes as much sense as blaming US developers for Accenture failing at the LSE and claiming that Asian programmers are the best because they made the LSE work.

Accenture developed .NET software for the LSE and a company in Sri Lanka made the new LSE software for Linux

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#26

Post by recoiledsnake »

nodata wrote: post #8
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so, yes. In fairness, though, it may not have been MS' fault - crappy programming is crappy, no matter the underlying OS. And Linux fanboys should wait to see if the new system has roll-out issues...

If I remember correctly, the LSE brought in Microsoft themselves to fix the problems. And Microsoft couldn't.

I doubt they could fix architectural issues that permeated from the very beginning after the fact.

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#27

Post by [deleted] »

lrm242 wrote: post #6

World record? Not quite. Let's see full details on the numbers. NASDAQ publishes their latency numbers weekly, including average, 99th percentile, and 99.9th percentile: http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet . Their average latency on order entry is 98 microseconds and their average latency on market data is 92 microseconds. Perhaps by "world record" they mean "european record".

[deleted]

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#28

Post by _grrr »

Rimpinths wrote: post #16
highlander wrote: post #14

It's fascinating that these latencies are an order of magnitude faster than most 'web services'. Can anyone provide more insight into what is specifically involved in executing a single trade? Are they just enqueueing a trade message in this latency or actually executing the trade? Are they including network latency in these numbers? Also, does anyone have any insights into the hardware and customizations?

I'm a software developer at an exchange in the US. The LSE has not released details of how it is measuring "latency", but FWIW, we measure latency as the time it takes to submit an order and receive an order acknowledgment or fill, with both the sending and receiving outside our firewall. The two biggest SW components involved are the FIX handler (the component used to process orders; FIX is an industry standard prot…

"we measure latency as the time it takes to submit an order and receive an order acknowledgment or fill, with both the sending and receiving outside our firewall." This isn't normally the metric exchanges are referring to when they say 'latency'. They mean the internal processing time, within their network, to process, fill and generate a response to an incoming order. Anything else depends on the individual clients connection, some may be co-located, some may not etc etc... exactly as lrm242 describes.

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#29

Post by lrm242 »

[deleted] wrote: post #27
lrm242 wrote: post #6

World record? Not quite. Let's see full details on the numbers. NASDAQ publishes their latency numbers weekly, including average, 99th percentile, and 99.9th percentile: http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet . Their average latency on order entry is 98 microseconds and their average latency on market data is 92 microseconds. Perhaps by "world record" they mean "european record".

[deleted]

Go read the website I linked to. NASDAQ publishes their methodology. I'll quote it for you here:

  OUCH Measurements of Order Latency
 
    * The time it takes to accept, process, and 
      acknowledge or fill an order.
    
    * Measured as the complete round trip for an order 
      or cancel transaction leaving a customer network 
      port, through the co-lo network and application 
      firewalls to the matching engine and back.
    
    * Measured in the production environment during a 
      full trading day including opening and close.
As you can see, they are including the time it takes to acknowledge and fill the order. It is the complete round trip time, and does include transit latency through the co-located network (which I thought was excluded).

Re: London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux

#30

Post by junkbit »

nozepas wrote: post #7

I'm sure they will notice much more benefits than just improved trading times. For example: improved infraestructure management, overall performance increase, fast patches for security bugs, and a long etcetera. Of course, as JoachimSchipper says, if the applications on top of the OS ar crap, a different OS won't solve the problem, but to have a good underlying OS is a good start.

Also complete control over your own future without being beholden to a 3rd party.
Post reply on HN