Fixing A High-Speed Server

The quote server wasn’t keeping up.

Our client, a trader and software developer, had a quote server written by another consultant. It had to handle 2.4 million messages a second, distributing market updates and orders to various clients.

Though it wouldn’t crash, its erratic latencies were a big problem.

We spent just a half day walking through the code with him. We pointed out some potential culprits, and identified other places where he could improve efficiency in the most performance-critical sections.

Our suggestions did the trick, bringing his server’s performance into the acceptable range with minimal impact to the existing code.

Humans don’t notice short-enough delays, but a real-time data-feed won’t wait.