General purpose computers networks and software are far from optimal for high speed trading. A few years back ACM Communications published a comprehensive white

General purpose computers networks and software are far from optimal for high speed trading. A few years back ACM Communications published a comprehensive white paper of trading communications bottlenecks including the effect of virtual memory page faults and TCP/IP collisions. Dedicated trade networks want custom software without virtualization features. Or if you dont want to develop that much, use the ancient real time UNIX NASA has in its space probes like VxWorks. In a few weeks there is annindie film called The Hummingbird Project about avrace between firms to build the fastest dedicated trading line.