London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK) [LWN.net]

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 18:17 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (26 responses)

It looks like someone wants to create another USS Yorktown case, trying to blame operating system for a failure of 3rd party application. In case of Yorktown, Windows NT didn't cause any problems - yet most people believe it did, due to cleverly written Wired article and personal beliefs of a middle-level management person with no technical knowledge and no technical involvement with the project.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 18:39 UTC (Thu) by woooee (guest, #54179) [Link] (10 responses)

Nowhere in the article did it say anything about a MS Windows failure, but instead said things like "TradElect has a troubled history". So they are migrating to another known/tested platform, which happens to be based on Linux. Also, they want to improve speed for real-time trades, which the new platform apparently delivers as well, again no mention of MS Windows.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 18:45 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (9 responses)

Wired article about the USS Yorktown didn't say Windows NT failed - they would get sued if they lied like this. What they did - and what is happening here - was constantly highlighting the operating system the software was running under. Nobody remembers who wrote the Smart Ship software - everyone remembers about Windows NT. Same thing in this case here - nobody remembers who made the previous platform, and who makes the new one, but everyone remembers that the faulty one was running under Windows, and the new one runs on Linux.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 21:04 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (8 responses)

I know who made the previous London Stock Exchange program:

Microsoft did. At least partially.

For customers this huge and opportunities this lucrative you can bet that
Microsoft put a crapload of effort into getting this system up and running
efficiently. LSE used all the star Microsoft technologies that were
available at the time: .NET, Windows 2003, MS SQL, and all that.

I don't know how much anybody here has dealt with Microsoft, but if your a
company deploying Microsoft solutions they will actually be devote quite a
bit time to you. Have their engineers work with your software guys to port
software and will even fly people out to work with you.

And that is just for a relatively small company. For something like the LSE
you can definitely bet that Microsoft pretty much had several employees
devoted nearly full time specifically to making that work. Both with the
software developers and the administrators who deployed it.

This is actually one of the nice points about Microsoft. If your using
their stuff and your running into problems they are not going to let you
twist in the wind; as long as your a big enough customer (of course).

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 21:52 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (7 responses)

Go read TheDailyWTF.com. 90% of these cases happened in Windows environment. Most of the companies involved could easily get support from Microsoft. There is nothing Microsoft can do if the company employs a bunch of morons.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 23:20 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

Microsoft put the London Stock Exchange up on its website as a case study.

http://switch.atdmt.com/action/FY07_Linux_LSE_Download

Would they really have done that if they thought the Accenture / TradElect guys were "a bunch of morons?"

> Go read TheDailyWTF.com. 90% of these cases happened in Windows environment

Maybe that's because smarter programmers prefer to use other platforms? Hmm, no, can't be. Must be another giant conspiracy.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 1:37 UTC (Fri) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (3 responses)

"There is nothing Microsoft can do if the company employs a bunch of morons."

Hate to be the one to break this to you, but Microsoft was heavily involved in all aspects of the LSE .NET implementation.

"Working with Microsoft and Accenture, the London Stock Exchange replaced its London Market Information Link (LMIL®) system with Infolect®. It used the Microsoft® .NET Framework, the Microsoft Visual C#® .NET development tool, and the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database." (source, emphasis mine)

"The application is based on Microsoft® .NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and was developed in partnership with both Microsoft and Accenture." (source, emphasis mine)

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 11:12 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

This is press-release-speak. It doesn't tell you how much real involvement Microsoft technical people had with the project. It might just as well mean that some marketing guy from Redmond played golf with the Accenture project manager (who can then sound good to his boss by saying he got special help from Microsoft).

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 18:32 UTC (Fri) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't see how us not knowing who did the "real" work benefits them in any way. Even if their only involvement was to spend 5 minutes writing a press release taking credit for the work, it is still their fault when it fails, just as it would be to their credit had it succeeded. Considering the LSE CIO touted his personal relationship with Steve Ballmer while he was dissing Linux, I would be absolutely astonished if Ballmer didn't send every member of the core .NET and Windows develop teams to the LSE when the shit hit the fan.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 24, 2010 22:26 UTC (Sun) by alextingle (guest, #20593) [Link]

Wow, that article is from 2003 and already it sounds like another world.

One 2003-era CIO said "[our supplier forced us to switch to Linux and] we found we had an additional overhead in understanding the technology and the total cost of ownership has risen." He was obviously influenced by those old "total cost of ownership" ads from Microsoft. You don't hear MS banging on about TCO these days do you?

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 16:14 UTC (Fri) by brianomahoney (guest, #6206) [Link] (1 responses)

Having read the comments on this thread I would politely suggest that you take your appologist comments, FUD and Astroturfing somewhere else.

LWN tries to be factual, and unbiased.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 28, 2010 21:46 UTC (Thu) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link]

I haven't been participating in this thread, but I feel I have to comment here:

> I would politely suggest that you take your appologist comments, FUD and Astroturfing somewhere else. LWN tries to be factual, and unbiased.

And it succeeds, in both cases; not only in the articles, but also, for the most part, in the comment threads. And part of the reason it succeeds in comment threads is the variety views represented by the commenters. There are two sides to every story, and in LWN, you will usually see the 'other' side presented fairly somewhere in the comments (even in stories involving companies viewed by most of the community as 'bad guys', such as Microsoft), if only sometimes by a devil's advocate in order to spark informed discussion. This is a good thing: uniform 'group-think' is the enemy of neutrality.

Anyway, the point of this is that accusing anyone who posts a comment in support of Microsoft of 'astroturfing' (i.e. being paid by Microsoft) is not only probably untrue, but also pretty counter-productive if your goal is informed discussion. Having all sides of the story represented is a good thing, even the sides you don't happen to agree with.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 18:56 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (11 responses)

From some of the more technical reports I saw the latency of the NASDAQ system compared to the London system was exponentially different. Regardless of middleware some of this is attributable to the underlying OS. Even if you disregard the latency one of the prime issues cited by the LSE was that the windows based systems needed to be restarted rather frequently, in some cases more than once a day (and one report mentioned a restart during trading hours which is a HUGE no no that stalled trading for 5 minutes), the NASDAQ system handles 24 hour trading with trade completions in less than 1 second in most cases and no trades that don't execute in less than 2 seconds from receipt of order.

Much of the flack the LSE system caught was because their competitors at NASDAQ and the New York SE were running so much more efficiently with Linux systems.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 20:39 UTC (Thu) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (10 responses)

There is no reason to believe that latency was actually caused by the operating system and not the middleware or just poor design of the application itself.

As for the restarts - there are many Linux systems out there that are restarted daily for exactly the same reason.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 1:45 UTC (Fri) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (7 responses)

there are many Linux systems out there that are restarted daily

If you could point me to some such systems I'd be curious to see what kind of setup they are running.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 8:28 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (6 responses)

One of such setups was having issues with XFS corrupting the filesystem in misterious ways. Another seems to just leak memory somewhere.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 10:22 UTC (Fri) by sgros (guest, #36440) [Link] (1 responses)

I think that the majority of Linux installations, at least those
commercially supported by RedHat, use ext3. So, in case XFS makes you, or
anyone else, a trouble you can migrate to something else. In case of
Windows, your only option is FAT32.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 13:28 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Most Windows servers, just like most Linux servers, just work and don't need this kind of workarounds.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 24, 2010 0:56 UTC (Sun) by stanford (guest, #63180) [Link] (3 responses)

I can't help but notice that the original poster, leoc, asked to be pointed
to some "Linux systems out there that are restarted daily". In other words,
he was politely asking you to substantiate your claim. You have made vague
allusions to "filesystem corruption" and "memory leaks", but have not
actually cited concrete evidence of such things.

I suspect that you may be mistaken in your original claim, and are therefore
unable to provide substantiation. Linux is used on a wide range of
architectures, including supercomputers that require very high availability,
and its uptime can be measured in years. I can find no evidence that Linux
either suffers systemic file corruption in XFS, or from memory leaks that
mandate a daily reboot.

If you could point me to such systems, I'd be curious to see what kind of
setup they are running.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 24, 2010 2:32 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I have to use a Linux system at work that's rebooted daily...

... because it's in a VM sitting atop a Windows 2008 Server system, which
needs a daily reboot before kernel memory leaks bring it to its knees. I
really wish my workplace weren't MS 'partners'.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 25, 2010 12:27 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

@stanford: What do you expect me to say, company names?

However, I actually can give you one company name, because they talked about this in public. Company is Nasza Klasa, kind of like Polish Facebook and one of the busiest websites in *.pl. One problem they had was that XFS was losing files. Just like that - something didn't quite work and the file was gone. It wasn't really a problem for them, because they had everything replicated, so were able to work around that in automated manner.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 25, 2010 12:31 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

@stanford: Also, by claiming that Linux is used in a mission-critical environments running without reboot for years, you seem to believe that it's somewhat different from Windows. It's not - Windows is being used in mission-critical environments as well, including military ones. And, believe it or not, it doesn't need daily reboots either.

What I'm trying to say is, both systems work OK for most people. But for some they don't, requiring restarts.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 11:13 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

A scheduled daily restart after the close of business is one thing; a random unplanned restart in the middle of trading hours is quite another.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 22, 2010 17:21 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

There is no reason to believe that latency was actually caused by the operating system and not the middleware or just poor design of the application itself.

There is a huge difference between typical business applications and the sort of 'soft realtime' performance that things like the stock exchange programs and telephony demand.

They require the ability to have not only low-latency, but deterministic latency. In other words.. you not only need to have the ability to get things done very quickly you need to have guarantees on how quickly it gets done.

Having the ability to guarantee latency like that is completely and totally unneeded for typical server setups. In fact having the OS even capable of doing this leads to lower efficiency and lower overall performance. It runs counter to the sort of typical loads that a server needs to support.

If you were to take typical benchmarks meant to gauge the performance of realistic application load on a system I would bet that those benchmarks would score lower on the Linux stuff used in the time sensitive portions of a stock market then if you just used a off the shelf Linux version from Redhat or Suse.

You are absolutely right that application developer can ruin any performance, but in this sort of situation the OS and the middle ware choices absolutely matters. It's critical, in fact.

Also the ability to have Linux be successfully customized for a specific purpose does not really reflect on how well it can meet the needs of typical business usage.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 19:53 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

You might start by laying the blame at Microsoft's feet: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

Get the facts!

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 23, 2010 19:37 UTC (Sat) by Doogie (guest, #59626) [Link] (1 responses)

LOL! Every article I've ever seen about the USS Yorktown specifically cites Windows NT for the ship board failures. I notice you tried unsuccessfully to argue something similar on wikipedia. As they rightly told you there, all the verifiable evidence strongly implicates Windows NT as the source of the problems with the USS Yorktown, so if you have any evidence proving otherwise you should provide it.

My apologies to everyone else for feeding the troll, sometimes I just can't resist.

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 25, 2010 12:42 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Actually, there is no evidence for the claim that Windows NT malfunctioned. If there was, the Wired author would write about Windows NT malfunction. He didn't. Given that the whole Wired article was based around the "Windows NT sunk the ship" story (after all, how many Wired readers would care about a bug in some proprietary navy software they never heard about?), the only reason for not saying straight that the Windows failed was the fact that it didn't, in fact, fail.

The exact cause of the problem is already known - missing NULL check in the application that... well, that did something with the ship. This missing check caused the application to crash. The only connection between this application and Windows was that it was running under Windows. It wasn't part of Windows, and it wasn't written by Microsoft.

Even the management guy (who wasn't directly involved and didn't really have any clue about what worked and what didn't) didn't claim that Windows NT failed - he claimed that he _believes_ that choice of Windows was not a good idea. In every corporation you will find dozens of people that believe Linux is bad and you shouldn't use it for critical parts of infrastructure. Exactly the same level of "technical insight".

London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

Posted Jan 21, 2010 19:20 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link] (1 responses)

Let's see here, two years ago you paid 40M for an upgrade to something that you are going to replace with something built by a company that you just paid 18M for? Sounds like you got taken two years ago.

Accenture customers

Posted Jan 22, 2010 6:00 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

sounds like you paid for "Go on. Be a Tiger" billboards in every airport terminal in the world.

Real Windows troubles

Posted Jan 22, 2010 20:07 UTC (Fri) by Milan (guest, #26716) [Link]

The real troubles with MS platform are: .NET troubles (heap fragmentation, long term unfixed issues), troubles with scalability (try to read about removing big kernel lock in Windows 2008 and W7 from Microsoft itself), NTFS fragmentation issues, no real real-time support (requires patching Windows kernel by third party), inability to hire somebody who is able to fix issues in the Windows kernel, inability to hire somebody, who is able to audit whole/part of the system. The big problem is that there is only ONE firm, who is able (or claiming to be) to fix and patch the core of the operating system.

Microsoft was heavily involved

Posted Jan 23, 2010 7:46 UTC (Sat) by ClarkMills (guest, #11490) [Link]

Hi all.

An article on M/S' showcase site: www.onwindows.com

26 October 2005
...
Andrew King, group director of financial services at Microsoft, said: "As a key strategic technology partner with the London Stock Exchange that places our .NET Framework and SQL Server database at its core, Infolect [the software] is an important milestone project for Microsoft, as well as the exchange's Technology Roadmap.

"The ever increasing demand for real-time, mission-critical data fluidity that underpins efficient trading has been answered by powerfully deployed, innovative and scaleable Microsoft technology."
...

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/London-Stock-Exchange-implements-Infolect/582/Default.aspx

Reading the January 21 2010 ComputerWorld article (TFA), it is written in a very Linux-negative tone. The first sentence of the article reads: "The London Stock Exchange has begun a twelve-month migration to its new trading platform, based on Linux, as trading fell sharply."

Microsoft is only mentioned once: "It will replace the outgoing TradElect platform, based on Microsoft .Net architecture and upgraded by Accenture only two years ago at a cost of £40 million."

It reads as if all the blame has been heaped on TradElect yet reading the prior articles there was obviously very tight linkage between M/S & TradElect.

Example: LSE CIO: "We like having a supplier we can touch and shout at and kick when something goes wrong," said Lester. "With Microsoft we have a partnership that goes all the way up to Steve Ballmer. At HP, we have a partnership that goes all the way up to Carly [Fiorina]. If anything goes wrong with our systems we will point the finger very publicly at them, and that makes them good suppliers."

ZDNet 2003:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39117009,00.htm

Have a look at the video on M/S site specifically note at 01:20 LSE CTO:

"Infolect was the first mission critical system to go live on the M/S .NET framework."

This is M/S' showcase project to try prove their metal. There are several shots in the video of a newspaper article "LSE chooses Windows over Linux for reliability"

Video here: mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/windowsserversystem/facts/videos/LSE_CaseStudy_Rev_750k.wmv

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

It's obvious that this was a M/S showpiece project and that M/S would have done everything possible to prop it up.

Cheers... Clark

Apologies for the rant, I just got back from [the fantastic] LCA and am half asleep. :)