London Stock Exchange hauled offline after major data problem | Hacker News Reader

London Stock Exchange hauled offline after major data problem

computerworlduk.com

47 pointsDMPenfold200814 comments

Clearly the problem stems from writing a finance-related application in something other than VBA-running-inside-Excel. "Linux"... what will they think of next!?

(I'm being sarcastic, but people say stuff like this every day and aren't. That's what's scary.)

There's a lot of ignorance going on in the articles out there. I know nothing of the internals of the project but it was commissioned to replace a system that has frequent outages (including a major one last week). Teething issues, while not desirable, are inevitable at such an early stage of the project. It's bound to be an incredibly complicated system.

I feel for the devs working on it. Bet they didn't have a fun morning....

Does this same logic apply to, say, a control module in a space craft, or the software behind an MRI machine?

Those are orders of magnitude easier to test.

I'm not sure about that. The testing problems are different, but not harder.

An exchange has to deal with massive scale, but isn't hugely complex (relative to a spacecraft, which deals with fault tolerance and integrating many different inputs; or the mathematical complexity of medical imaging).

It seems to me that most aspects of scale aren't too difficult to emulate, given sufficient computing resources to generate the load.

Any time you are dealing with a system with that many users, you are going to introduce a lot of chaos (in its mathematical sense). Chaos is nearly impossible to test for because there are just too many permutations.

You are (probably) right that any particular piece of a trading system would be easier to build and test than the examples you gave, but in aggregate, I think it would be much more difficult.

No it isn't. It's a matter of maturity and mindset. The avionics industry has it - they use Ada and formal methods, most of the rest of the software development world doesn't. and they pay the price. Honestly I questioned the competence of the LSE when they outsourced their development for the first windows based trading system to a consulting shop.

Simply put, they outsourced a core, critical part of the UK's financial infrastructure to boobs. However, I do see some hope in haskell and ocaml entering the financial market.

London Stock Exchange is live, offers no real explanation for outage

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3262766/lond...

The last paragraph is quite interesting - 3 different exchange platforms having problems in the same week one after another. While this might be just a coincidence... maybe someone knows how to crash the systems?

Major issues just a week after moving to a new Linux-based system [1]? It has potential to be a fairly nasty PR-blow.

[1] http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3260727/lond...

It's a new system that does a ridiculously difficult thing on a scale that makes it nearly impossible to test completely.

London Stock Exchange has called a crisis meeting with market data vendors

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262882

I suspect malicious activity or automated trading systems could be the source of problems, in addition to engineering. Don't assume it's automatically Linux vs .NET.

Where is the back up? Heads should roll

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