EXTRA: London Stock Exchange: blame Microsoft?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/extra_lo ... _microsoft
Mike Simons reports:
Microsoft adThe London Stock Exchange ... suspended trading as dealers reacted to the dramatic economic news that the U.S. government had taken over control of mortgage groups Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, in the biggest financial bailout in world history.
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The breakdown occurred just days after the LSE announced plans to improve services as it competes against a range of new entrants in the market. Among the LSE's initiatives is a move to slash the time it takes to complete a trade from six milliseconds to three
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Trading was halted at 8:45 a.m. London time. According to Reuters, it was not restored until shortly before close of the trading day, which is 4 p.m. The LSE said the system had been hit by a "connectivity issue" and insisted that the problem did not lie with its flagship TradElect trading platform.more
But Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols knows people who know different:
So what happened? Officially, the LSE ... gave the vague explanation, that "It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn't have foreseen," and not caused by high-volume.
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I have friends in London and... Well, let me just make the following points about TradElec. First, TradElec runs on ... Windows Server 2003 ... [and] a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture ... on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times.
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The programmers and serious database administrators in the audience can already see where this is going. Sorry, Microsoft, .NET Framework is simply incapable of performing this kind of work, and SQL Server 2000, or any version of SQL Server really, can't possibly handle the world's number three stock exchange's transaction load on a consistent basis.
I'd been hearing from friends who trade on the LSE for ages about how slow the system could get. Now, I know why.more