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London Stock Exchange hauled offline after major data problem
- Powerscroft 16y agoWhere is the back up? Heads should roll
- jrockway 16y agoClearly the problem stems from writing a finance-related application in something other than VBA-running-inside-Excel. "Linux"... what will they think of next!? (I'm being sarcastic, but people say stuff like this every day and aren't. That's what's scary.)
- aidos 16y agoThere's a lot of ignorance going on in the articles out there. I know nothing of the internals of the project but it was commissioned to replace a system that has frequent outages (including a major one last week). Teething issues, while not desirable, are inevitable at such an early stage of the project. It's bound to be an incredibly complicated system. I feel for the devs working on it. Bet they didn't have a fun morning....
- bmj 16y agoDoes this same logic apply to, say, a control module in a space craft, or the software behind an MRI machine?
- nialo 16y agoThose are orders of magnitude easier to test.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoI'm not sure about that. The testing problems are different, but not harder. An exchange has to deal with massive scale, but isn't hugely complex (relative to a spacecraft, which deals with fault tolerance and integrating many different inputs; or the mathematical complexity of medical imaging). It seems to me that most aspects of scale aren't too difficult to emulate, given sufficient computing resources to generate the load.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoAny time you are dealing with a system with that many users, you are going to introduce a lot of chaos (in its mathematical sense). Chaos is nearly impossible to test for because there are just too many permutations. You are (probably) right that any particular piece of a trading system would be easier to build and test than the examples you gave, but in aggregate, I think it would be much more difficult.
- spitfire 16y agoNo it isn't. It's a matter of maturity and mindset. The avionics industry has it - they use Ada and formal methods, most of the rest of the software development world doesn't. and they pay the price. Honestly I questioned the competence of the LSE when they outsourced their development for the first windows based trading system to a consulting shop. Simply put, they outsourced a core, critical part of the UK's financial infrastructure to boobs. However, I do see some hope in haskell and ocaml entering the financial market.
- p0ppe 16y agoMajor issues just a week after moving to a new Linux-based system [1]? It has potential to be a fairly nasty PR-blow. [1] http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3260727/london-stock-exchange-in-historic-linux-go-live/ http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3260727/lond...
- rbanffy 16y agoIt's a new system that does a ridiculously difficult thing on a scale that makes it nearly impossible to test completely.
- DMPenfold2008 16y agoLondon Stock Exchange is live, offers no real explanation for outage http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3262766/london-stock-exchange-is-live-no-real-explanation-for-outage/ http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3262766/lond...
- akadien 16y agoI suspect malicious activity or automated trading systems could be the source of problems, in addition to engineering. Don't assume it's automatically Linux vs .NET.
- DMPenfold2008 16y agoLondon Stock Exchange has called a crisis meeting with market data vendors http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262882 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262882
- viraptor 16y agoThe last paragraph is quite interesting - 3 different exchange platforms having problems in the same week one after another. While this might be just a coincidence... maybe someone knows how to crash the systems?