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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

The lag of six or seven seconds before a trade is executed "is not acceptable,"

I don't understand what a DDoS has to do with trade lag. They're DDoSing the website, not the trading engine, right?

6 or 7 seconds is bad enough, but it's a huge understatement. MtGox's trading engine "lag" can grow to absurd numbers, it was like 10 minutes a couple days ago. I honestly can't comprehend how it gets this bad. It should be on the order of micro or milli seconds. It's not like matching up trades is computationally expensive.

Anyone have an explanation?

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I would hope not, but this makes me skeptical. Does this mean that the trading engine and the website are the same entity?

Yes, they are.

They currently have a project underway to separate the two.

The site owner, MagcialTux, said yesterday in irc that for the last couple of years (since the first bubble) they've basically made barely enough revenue to keep the site running (and sometimes at a loss), much less improving it. They looked at loans, but the most they could arrange was a couple hundred thousand, which wouldn't have been enough apparently. They also privately contacted big bitcoin fortune holders for loans, to the same result.

The kind of people that you'd hire to make it work right are expensive, to no one's surprise. The last few months have given Gox a huge increase in revenue, and they're using it to finally upgrade their tech.

I'm not a Gox fan, and I wish people would use the other exchanges and get some diversity into the system, but I can understand how they got where they are.

6, 7 seconds? Few days ago there was a 1 HOUR lag. I am not kidding. All MtGox APIs have lagged a whole frickin' hour behind their trading engine. Now THAT was bad. And I see more than 60 seconds lag nearly every day.

Edit: Seems you updated the post, so now my is obsolete :).

Anyway, their official explanation is that the engine is so slow because when iterating over the whole orderbook, which is huge, they have to check if every offer has enough funds for it to be executed. This is a design flaw and they want to fix it by not letting you to place a order without sufficient funds in the first place.

That sounds like terrible software engineering and doesn't inspire confidence.

Actually for them it's a feature, and there is an API call for that: http://mtgox.com/api/1/generic/order/lag Currently: "lag_secs":85.319123

Now: {"result":"success","return":{"lag":588717,"lag_secs":0.588717,"lag_text":"0.588717 seconds"}}

What is bad is that sometimes you can't cancel a bid or an offer and you end up selling or buying something you didn't want.

Well that's actually bad if you day trade... which is kinda bad for the currency anyway.

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