

London Stock Exchange in historic Linux go-live - DMPenfold2008
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3260727/london-stock-exchange-in-historic-linux-go-live/

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mbreese
This is a big win for Linux. The London stock exchange was one of Microsoft's
big clients that it touted in marketing materials. The with the high profile
problems (outage / slow), it quickly became a headache for Microsoft. If I
remember correctly, Accenture blamed them and they blamed Accenture.

If their Linux system does well, with no major problems, it will be a nice
high-profile case study for Linux.

~~~
rbranson
It is sad that the underlying system gets blamed in these cases. While it is
easiest to simplify and the blame gets passed around, there's no reason why
you can't build a fault-tolerant system on-top of Windows. In fact, there's
nothing particular about Linux that makes it immune from failure or
bottlenecks (hardware, infrastructure, etc) that a high availability, high
throughput system would need to overcome, nullifying any increases in
stability or performance innate to the OS.

While I would professionally recommend Linux over Windows, it wouldn't be for
reasons of "stability" or "performance" but that it was simpler and more
straight-forward to sanely manage large farms of interdependent Linux boxes
and that Linux provides a better development platform for these types of
distributed applications.

I agree though, it would be a nice anecdotal win for Linux.

~~~
artmageddon
From what I read, Accenture built the system using SQL Server 2000... but this
was a system that had been upgraded in 2007. Why didn't they use SQL Server
2005? I tried looking around also but couldn't find anymore technical details
on what exactly caused the system to fail.

I should mention that despite being a .Net guy by trade I too would recommend
a Linux system for something like this, especially for performance reasons
where microseconds matter. Still I can't help but feel a little frustrated
that no one ever said what exactly occurred beyond "one or two unforseen
events happened that brought down the London exchange for several hours". In
fact, one article even attributed the outage to human error! Aside from poor
UI design or confusing procedures, sometimes it's a matter of PEBKAC.

(or maybe I just didn't get lucky in my searches)

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nopal
The article says, "...Millennium Exchange was processing messages at a round
trip latency of only 126 microseconds..."

Is this right, or did the author mean milliseconds?

~~~
oogali
microseconds.

internal messaging latency is measured in microseconds

order acknowledgement/cancel/fulfillment is measured in microseconds to low
milliseconds.

~~~
moe
Let me be the first to say that this is pretty damn fast.

For reference, try to ping a remote host in your LAN. You'll see about the
same roundtrip time (~150 microseconds) and that's without a payload to speak
of and without any processing going on.

~~~
jedbrown
Round-trip latencies for small MPI messages are typically a couple
microseconds over InfiniBand, under 10 microseconds for 10G Ethernet without
TCP, and a bit more when going through TCP.

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drstrangevibes
my code to interface with this for a major financial exchange went live today
too. So far its been working perfectly!

~~~
pacoverdi
Same here.

Thanks LSE for providing us with one of the simplest protocols to code
against!

For those wondering what kind of protocol I'm talking about:
<http://goo.gl/ld9aj> (MIT203 and MIT303).

~~~
bokchoi
Unshortened URL:

[http://www.londonstockexchange.com/products-and-
services/mil...](http://www.londonstockexchange.com/products-and-
services/millennium-exchange/technicalinformation/technicalinformation.htm)

