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Network Monitoring Appliance Looks Below 1 Microsecond
eweekhickins writes "Corvil has unveiled a new tool to help network managers cope with increasing pressure to improve performance. This appliance, from the Dublin-based company (with backing from Cisco), passively monitors traffic across networks in segments below 1 microsecond in length and correlates monitoring data with remote appliances and gives a complete picture of latency, jitter, packet loss and other phenomena that affect network and application performance. Corvil CEO Donal Byrne noted that 'If you can drop a millisecond [of latency] off, you're a hero.'"
Now I can get those random stock tips in my email in less milliseconds! I will be rich one day, I will!
Milliseconds count. Maybe not to your stock tips, but trust me as someone who has spent about a decade in this kind of environment now - sub-millisecond latencies certainly count in automated trading between investment banks/hedge funds/whatever. To the point where people are prepared to pay fortunes to have their machines located physically closer to an exchange.
For fun, check out arbitrage, and then ponder again why reducing latency might be important in a competitive environment. Think about highly liquid markets, such as spot foreign exchange.
Cheers,
Ian
The benefit depends on the person using it. Take an investment bank and an algorithmic trading system. Most of your money is made on volume, the faster you reply the more deals you get, the more volume you have, the more money you make. I've seen a lot of presentations at investment banks where every 5 milliseconds they shave off is $50+ million/year more money they make. Keep in mind that most of these companies have gotten to the point where they can do round trip for the whole trade transaction in 5 milliseconds or less. So each millisecond is like a 20% improvement.
What is the buffer capacity of the server's NIC?... How long does it take to empty it?... What was the guy just before you doing? Did he fill it?
Sorry, but do you really think people don't do that level of analysis as well as trying to improve the network speed?
My point is that if you're looking at spending money for a 1 millisecond gain, you've already lost sight of the goal.
The goal in this kind of app is low latency - every millisecond counts. There are other goals of course, throughput, guaranteed maximums as well as low minimums...but in this case we were specifically discussing latency.
And that's not even counting a router or everything that can slow down your Internet connection
Internet connection? Who's talking about an internet connection? Dedicated leased lines direct to the exchange, internal transfer between machines...this kind of stuff isn't One Man And His PC sitting at home trying to day-trade. Yes there's variability, but even so engineering it out as much as possible is certainly an aim.
All the levels of analysis you describe, from the algorithm right through to the NIC, are already being done. At some point they will be done better, because of a change in available tools. This appears to be one of those tools.
Cheers,
Ian
Do not assume that the people interested in this level of performance are idiots. There's always the possibility they know more about what they're doing than you do.
doc