London Stock Exchange Tackles System Problem

DMandPenfold writes "The London Stock Exchange has taken steps to resolve a system problem that occurred at 4.30pm Tuesday, which saw a delay to the start of the closing auction and knocked out automatic trades during a 42 second period. The problem occurred a day after the high profile launch of its new matching engine on the main equities market, based on the SUSE Linux system from Novell."

Re:First posters are lame

[iserlohn]

The system has been online since the middle of last year. Nice for you to drop by and dish out out your golden nuggets of wisdom tough.

Re:First posters are lame

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary is even lamer. It didn't knock out any trading. What happened is that the closing auction announcement was delayed by 42 seconds. Normally any trades submitted prior to the announcement get ignored. However, in this case I'll quote from the article:

LSE traders are required to wait for the message before trading. Normally auction trade instructions sent before the message would not complete, however because of the surprise delay, on this occasion order book trades were allowed to complete later.

So, no outage, no downtime, no lost trades.

TradElect & InfoLect lasted longer... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

"So, in conclusion, yes, it's about the platform. .NET, MSSQL 2003, etc aren't robust enough for this kind of job." - by mangu (126918) on Thursday February 17, @07:15AM (#35230620)

Oh, really? That's NOT what London Stock Exchange reps said:

"LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect's fault" - http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform [computerworld.com] by Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols

The other day here, while I was replying to other "Pro-*NIX" penguins here, I said this:

"TradElect &/or InfoLect being the Microsoft based system - & mind you also, it lasted just fine from 2007 until the crash that occurred, & from what I have been reading about it, it happened on the biggest volume day that exchange ever saw due to some takeover... it remains to be seen if Linux based MilleniumIT's system will handle THAT level of "load" too...!" - by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 15, @01:26PM (#35212722) from http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1995760&cid=35207904 [slashdot.org]

Well, it appears I didn't have to wait long... lol, or even wait for a day of EXTREMELY HEAVY TRADING either!

APK

P.S.=> So far, under this Linux system MilleniumIT, the LSE's crashed TWICE ALREADY, and in less than 1 year!

By way of comparison?

The LSE under .NET systems, TradElect & InfoLect, ran fine from 2007 until it froze on the biggest trading volume day they ever had there (see the article above) due to some "takeover"... that's 2 yrs. or more worth of uptime out of it...

However, only THAT level of "stress on the system" collapsed the C#.NET/SQLServer 2000/Windows Server 2003 combination (not what's happening now to LSE under Linux, 2x now, no less).

(I bolded SQLServer 2000, because BETTER versions of it exist in 2005 & 2008, & I suspect IT was the "weakest link" in that mixture actually - but, more & more, it's looking like the IT Team handling things, actually, were I one to guess...) apk