Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilitirit | Hacker News Reader

This information is relatively useless to me. Was the old system slower because of the OS, .NET, or some other factor(s)?

View on HN

That is certainly hard to say. It was, as I understand it, built by avanade, the joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture.

The speed of a system as complex as an exchange is influenced by many factors--network infrastructure, language of choice, software architecture, OS tuning.

In fact, garbage collected languages are known to perform well in serious low-latency systems.

Some firms have been known to rewrite the network stack for performance.

So presuming that it is an OS issue, or a language issue, or a vendor issue alone is not likely to arrive at a useful answer.

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 that.

In general, I would blame the incompetence of Accenture for the failure: bad decisions, bad architecture, bad management, using the wrong tools, crappy code.

.Net and newer windows have some really cool real-time features -- like deterministic garbage collection options, various per-thread priorities for scheduling, preemption and so on, making it a decent real-time platform. (for some definitions of real-time).

> especially since they've introduced HTTP.SYS (parts of the HTTP server now run in kernel level).

Isn't it something Red Hat did a long time ago that was widely regarded as a Very Bad Idea?

And why would you use HTTP in this scenario anyway?

I don't know why it didn't work out for Red Hat but it works quite well on Windows. And honestly I don't know whether they use(d) HTTP or not, but given that HTTP is dead simple and as lightweight as a protocol could get, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to use it for exchanging messages in this scenario.

Are they actually using HTTP for anything?

I have absolutely no idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com