London Stock Exchange Price Errors 'Emerged At Linux Launch' 168
DMandPenfold writes "Within the first 20 seconds of the London Stock Exchange's new matching engine going live on Monday, price data vendors began displaying incorrect prices, blank prices and wrong trading volumes, according to Computerworld UK sources. Thomson Reuters, Interactive Data and Netbuilder are among the largest data vendors, providing share prices to traders, that have been displaying pricing problems on some stocks throughout the week. Even the LSE's own data vendor, ProQuote, experienced problems. Concerns are being raised that there could be mistakenly setup connections or incorrect software interfaces at some of the large data vendors. Alternatively, there may be a data caching issue at the LSE that means data going out is not properly synchronised between different systems."
either sympathy or accusation (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, the line that catches my eye most is: "The fact the majority of smaller vendors were fine demonstrated that those having trouble had made mistakes." In my experience, that means one of two things:
1) The devs configuring the system didn't properly account for the sheer scale of the stress on their systems.
2) The smaller vendors took the change more seriously, and being smaller and more flexible, successfully updated their systems to interact properly with the new systems.
Or, of course, both.
Re:either sympathy or accusation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Testing? (Score:2, Insightful)
First off, you can have 15 YEARS To test, if you are understaffed and underskilled you will discover jack squat.
Second, THIS news comes out three days after Slashdot wrote what amounts to a slam piece on .Net's failures to handle this business. Hmm, what happened here? These problems are noted in the title of the article itself as emerging after Linux/C++ solutions were brought to bear.
Lets face facts, the core of EVERY issue (the failures in the .Net system that led to its replacement, the failures we're witnessing now, the failure at switch, the failure to test properly, notice the trend?) isn't the language/platform in question but the general incompetence with which the issue is being handled.
what does that have to do with Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it didn't crash and didn't drop its network connections, Linux was doing its job.
If the application software had bugs, then the application software developers are to blame.
Re:Testing? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you can take off the tinfoil hat on the sabotage thoughts. For one LSE's own quote providing solution is experiencing the same issue. So unless they have some diabolical plan to sabotage themselves, I think that fact should rule that out. Also, this is effecting large players. These are billion dollar companies whose sole propose is to provide accurate data and provide it fast. Without that they simply don't exist. You'd have to live in a very conspiracy theory driven existence to think they'd all really all throw their own companies and livelihoods away in some dark plan to get the LSE or Linux.
Now would all these large players all have made the exact same errors in their interfaces so they are seeing these same issues while the smaller players seem to have got it right? Sure. But the simplest explanation, of course is they are all experiencing the same issue because of some upstream problem with scaling to their large volumes. Those actually involved seem to point to some caching issue. Is that true? No clue, but they are certainly in a better position to offer analysis of the issue than you or I. That doesn't mean Linux is bad for christ's sake (so you don't have to go on some crazy conspiracy hunt to explain it away). If it is true (and we certainly don't know that it is, though the information currently available may point that way), you know what? There is software which just happens to be running on Linux, which may have an issue. No big deal. Happens every day on every platform. Not some big black eye on Linux if some software that happens to run on Linux has issues and no need to start jumping to conspiracies to explain it away.
Re:what does that have to do with Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
If it didn't crash and didn't drop its network connections, Linux was doing its job.
If the application software had bugs, then the application software developers are to blame.
Even if the OS itself isn't at fault, don't think that someone with an axe to grind won't blame it. You'll just hear something like "It's Too Hard to develop on Linux. A platform with more / better tools would have made it easier to develop and comprehensively test." I don't buy that either (regardless of what price you quote me! ;) ), but I'm sure someone will be saying it. Especially someone in marketing.
Re:Should have kept Windows. (Score:2, Insightful)
If this has been Windows story, there would be much frothing at the mouth and blame on Microsoft. Since it is Linux, the blame magically lies with the implementation.
Hyporcrite much, Slashdot?
Re:what does that have to do with Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
But when they had problems with the Windows-based system, obviously it was the fault of the operating system! Right? I seem to remember that being the case.
Because Slashdot ain't anything if not hypocritical!
Re:Linux fails... AGAIN (Score:2, Insightful)