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

Posted Jan 22, 2010 17:21 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK) by trasz
Parent article: London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)

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.