London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "This summer, the London Stock Exchange decided to move away from its Microsoft .Net-based trading platform, TradElect. Instead, they'll be using the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system. The switch is a pretty savage indictment of the costs of a complex .Net system. The GNU/Linux-based software is also faster, and offers several other major benefits. The details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance — and very expensive — enterprise systems. ... [R]ather than being just any old deal that Microsoft happened to lose, this really is something of a total rout, and in an extremely demanding and high-profile sector. Enterprise wins for GNU/Linux don't come much better than this."

Comments

It's just a VM

[iamacat]

.Net is just a specification and a bunch of languages. There is an open source implementation of .Net itself and certainly many open source projects written in C#. "Rejects windows for open source" would have been a more appropriate headline. I hope they still use some kind of language with bounds checking and type safety, given the dangers of buffer overrun exploits in a national stock trading system.

Re:It's just a VM

[onefriedrice]

This is all nice and stuff in theory. Every so often, people sometimes like to try to argue that code running under a VM such a java or C# with .Net are "as fast" or faster than machine-compiled code from C or C++ because of JIT and runtime optimizations and whatnot. Unfortunately, the reality just doesn't follow the theory. In real-world benchmarks, managed code is not faster than pre-compiled machine code. Period. This is just more evidence of what we already know. If the goal is sub-ten millisecond latency (and it is for stock exchange systems), LSE apparently never met that goal while other C++ solutions have for years. We can talk to death about data structure implementations and whatnot, but at the end of the day, we'll need to look around and see what the real-world results are telling us.

Wall Street

[Enderandrew]

Didn't the New York Stock Exchange move over to Linux because Microsoft couldn't provide a good, low-latency RT kernel? They begged Microsoft, wanted to stay with Microsoft, and Microsoft couldn't provide them with a solution.

Re:is slashdot news?

[datapharmer]

yes.

Care to try a self-eating watermelon?

savage idictment of .net?

[shadowrat]

i read the article and found this.

while TradElect is based on Microsoftâ(TM)s .Net technology. The choice of the latter, which has raised quite a few eyebrows in the market, is defended by Lester. He claims that LSE is coming off TradElect not because of the .Net technology itself (although its trading speed is 2.7 milliseconds compared to Linux-based Chi-Xâ(TM)s 0.4 milliseconds), but âfor more control, less costs, and the ability to build and innovateâ(TM). Furthermore, he describes LSEâ(TM)s experience with .Net as âvery positiveâ(TM).

i will grant that the 2.7 ms benchmark is definately slower than .4 ms. However, i don't think you can benchmark the trading speed of .Net, only the trading speed of TradElect. Last time i checked msdn, there was no System.StockExchange namespace provided with the .net framework.

These articles sound more like MilleniumIT's just got a faster, nicer, cheaper product than TradElect. It sounds to me like Accenture failed, not .net

Performance is neither here nor there

[gadget junkie]

Having read the article, and having traded equities on the London Stock exchange and Borsa Italiana for twenty years, I must say that I believe that the declaration that it was not a performance issue is correct.....to the point that I suspect that no amount of performance gains on Microsoft's part would have turned the scales.
Stock Exchanges are not national monopolies anymore, even if the few remaining big ones are gobbling each other. Controlling the technology involved is much more important than a slight performance hit. The London stock exchange scores a double hit on this one, since not only it will own the system, but the internals of said system will be open source, freeing it for example from limitation of sale to third parties by the US government. And anyway, when an istitution that big uses only Microsoft inhouse, is like having another stakeholder on your back, with an agenda of its own, like having you switch soon to the latest and greatest of its Server suite, if only for its publicity value. By doing the move, LSE is back to setting its own pace. I wish I could do the same on my desktop in the office.

Re:Isn't it a bad app?

[notasheep]

Because it's Slashdot, silly.

More important than funny

[xzvf]

"Enterprise wins for GNU/Linux don't come much better than this." Enterprise wins like this are happening all the time for Linux and other free software options. What makes this unique is MS touted LSE running their system as a huge win for their solution. The fact it gets ripped out a year latter for Linux is marketing gold if free software needed to market.

Because....

[symbolset]

They had $60M to throw into development. There's a good chance it's as fast as they could make it.

Also, Microsoft gets to crow about the awesome power of their platform when they "win" these big installations. It's only fair we get to revel in it when they stub their toe on them.

Re:Out of context theator

[pavera]

You are incorrect, they are trading a $65 million dollar piece of software for a $30 million COMPANY. They bought the MilleniumIT company that had ALREADY IMPLEMENTED a trading platform. They bought the company for the platform, and now they control the development of the platform going forward in house. They are not trading one IT consultancy for another, as they now OWN the software and the company that built it.

However, they state the platform they bought ALREADY achieves 6 times the performance of the piece of software built by accenture (.4ms vs 2.7ms transaction times).

While I agree that this is more of an indictment of Accenture's apparently shoddy work than of .NET itself, the fact that they've had 6 years (the article states the TradElect software/project was started in 2003) and $65 million dollars thrown at the problem and haven't been able to make the software perform better does raise some eyebrows about the underlying technology as well.

Re:Isn't it a bad app?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Strictly speaking, it isn't. However, back before they made the change, the deployment of the app was supposed to be a ringing endorsement of the platform. It was one of the most prominent "get the facts" cases. So, although the relationship between the quality of the app and the quality of the platform isn't obvious in either direction, there is certain symmetry here. If the app's success was going to be an endorsement, and was hyped as such, its failure can plausibly be considered an indictment.

Re:How fast

[ergo98]

As one other note, while OSS fanatics (I'm quite keen about OSS, but not quite a fanatic) go apeshit about this - This was more "switched from Accenture to running it `in house' in the form of a large team of low-paid talent in Sri Lanka" way more than it was "abandoned .NET for Linux! Rah rah rah!". The fact that people are hilariously so focused on the latter while missing the former speaks to how incredibly myopic people can be.

Re:How fast

[Red Flayer]

The LSE sounds like it has very incompetent technical leadership, and this sounds very pie-in-the-sky-ish. So now in return for selecting this Sri Lankan company, they get 100% ownership (???) of some speculative wish. Great. .NET is a fantastic development environment, and it is fantastic for virtually any size websites. Probably not so great for real-time trading, though throw enough specialization at it and you can get whatever you want out of it.

Wait, Microsoft + Accenture built a piss-poor platform. As you may recall, Accenture is a giant in the consulting business. Their combined efforts failed miserably.

Linux is the OS of most large trading systems. This has been covered on slashdot before.

MilleniumIT has a proven product in deployment in several exchanges. Their product is not pie-in-the-sky. It works. They've had several big wins in the past decade. They've been collaborating with Intel on optimizing their platform. Their transaction processing times are an order of magnitude better than LSE's current system.

So, I'm not sure what your angle is... are you trolling? Astroturfing? Or just spouting knee-jerk reactionism without any kind of basis in reality? A quick googling might have helped you out a bit.

Re:De Icaza Responds

[Darinbob]

The article was clear that they were not dumping .Net just because it was .Net, but dumping the application and system that just happened to use .Net. They also dumped the out-source model and actually bought the company that makes the new product so that they would have more in-house control. The .Net thing is just a minor quibble in the big story.

The languages are merely tools; the bigger picture is about the application and the customers. The problem with Microsoft's approach to being a "solutions provider" is that they're too focused on pushing their tools and technology, with the actual application being an afterthought. That is, they're Microsoft focused, not customer focused.

At the end of the day, the London Stock Exchange could not care less what the developers think about the language they're using, or even what the operating system is. They're not trying to stick a finger in the eye of Microsoft or promote open source, they just want a product that does what they want at the best price they can get.

That "benchmark" is bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Your programs don't even do the same thing since some of them have multiple increments of the loop variable.
2) Your C++ program is not idiomatic STL. If it were you'd use an iterator (which is typically a pointer for vector) as the loop variable.

I'm not of the opinion that insert-high-level-language-with-GC-here is necessarily slower than insert-C-or-C++-or-whatever-here, but bullshit benchmarks aren't going to help make that case.

Re:De Icaza Responds

[siloko]

what other platform allows you to literally mix inline assembly within functional programming?

Delphi - since like about 1993