

London Stock Exchange hauled offline after major data problem - DMPenfold2008
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3262702/london-stock-exchange-hauled-offline-after-major-data-problem/

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jrockway
Clearly the problem stems from writing a finance-related application in
something other than VBA-running-inside-Excel. "Linux"... what will they think
of next!?

(I'm being sarcastic, but people say stuff like this every day and aren't.
That's what's scary.)

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aidos
There's a lot of ignorance going on in the articles out there. I know nothing
of the internals of the project but it was commissioned to replace a system
that has frequent outages (including a major one last week). Teething issues,
while not desirable, are inevitable at such an early stage of the project.
It's bound to be an incredibly complicated system.

I feel for the devs working on it. Bet they didn't have a fun morning....

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bmj
Does this same logic apply to, say, a control module in a space craft, or the
software behind an MRI machine?

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SoftwareMaven
Any time you are dealing with a system with that many users, you are going to
introduce a lot of chaos (in its mathematical sense). Chaos is nearly
impossible to test for because there are just too many permutations.

You are (probably) right that any particular piece of a trading system would
be easier to build and test than the examples you gave, but in aggregate, I
think it would be much more difficult.

~~~
spitfire
No it isn't. It's a matter of maturity and mindset. The avionics industry has
it - they use Ada and formal methods, most of the rest of the software
development world doesn't. and they pay the price. Honestly I questioned the
competence of the LSE when they outsourced their development for the first
windows based trading system to a consulting shop.

Simply put, they outsourced a core, critical part of the UK's financial
infrastructure to boobs. However, I do see some hope in haskell and ocaml
entering the financial market.

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DMPenfold2008
London Stock Exchange is live, offers no real explanation for outage

[http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-
business/3262766/lond...](http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-
business/3262766/london-stock-exchange-is-live-no-real-explanation-for-
outage/)

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viraptor
The last paragraph is quite interesting - 3 different exchange platforms
having problems in the same week one after another. While this might be just a
coincidence... maybe someone knows how to crash the systems?

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p0ppe
Major issues just a week after moving to a new Linux-based system [1]? It has
potential to be a fairly nasty PR-blow.

[1] [http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-
source/3260727/lond...](http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-
source/3260727/london-stock-exchange-in-historic-linux-go-live/)

~~~
rbanffy
It's a new system that does a ridiculously difficult thing on a scale that
makes it nearly impossible to test completely.

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DMPenfold2008
London Stock Exchange has called a crisis meeting with market data vendors

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262882>

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akadien
I suspect malicious activity or automated trading systems could be the source
of problems, in addition to engineering. Don't assume it's automatically Linux
vs .NET.

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Powerscroft
Where is the back up? Heads should roll

