Latency Stats

As part of TabbFORUM’s Spotlight Series, Innovations in Trading & Technology, Gregory Crawford (Editor TabbFORUM) meets Donal Byrne (CEO Corvil) to discuss the creation and use of www.latencystats.com.

By Fergal Toomey - Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at Corvil

In my last blog entry I discussed the prevalence of ‘microbursts’ in market data feeds – short, occasional bursts of activity in the feed during which data rates reach levels much higher than average. We saw that during busy periods the LatencyStats.com feeds can send many high-rate microbursts in succession, each burst lasting much less than one second. If the data rate during a microburst exceeds the capacity of a network link or a feed handler, the excess data will be forced to queue. This adds latency to the feed messages, and in the worst case messages may be discarded if a system runs out of buffer space to hold waiting data.

By Fergal Toomey - Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at Corvil

A market data ‘microburst’ is a short burst of high activity in a feed, typically lasting much less than a second but posing a risk of temporarily saturating the resources available to a receiver (and thereby adding latency). While the term ‘microburst’ might suggest a duration measured in microseconds, in practice it’s often used to describe any burst short enough to pass under the radar of traditional load-monitoring tools (that measure average loads over seconds or minutes). Detecting microbursts requires a monitoring system that can accurately sample activity patterns at very short timescales – a ‘microscope’, if you will.

By Adam Honoré - Research Director, Aite Group

Latency race is the grand oxymoron of electronic trading. Have you ever been in a race where everyone manages their own stopwatch and the winner is determined by gut feel? Further, vendors operate like a collection of supplement manufacturers. “Our research has shown we are the steroid you need to be the fastest in the race”. Firms that just want to buy and hold assets now feel they need to be in the race because not being in the race means they lose the race by default. The problem is none of those firms know what time they need to beat to be considered a serious competitor in the race.