Going The Extra Mile
Christian JamesProduct Manager
Push Technology Ltd
Mike StolzVP of Architecture
GemStone Systems Inc.
Agenda
• Demands within the betting industry• What is latency• The cost of latency• Combating latency• GemFire/Diffusion solution• Q&A
Demanding and competitive environment
Technology drives competitive advantage
Demanding business requirements and drivers
• Speed, Stability, Scalability• Increase the number of markets offered• The ability to offer more volatile markets• Deliver to more channels• Improved marketing/advertising capabilities• Minimize unmatched orders/bets• Global distribution and real-time replication• Localized Data creating better user experience• Cost effective
Latency is everywhere
What is latency?
Total latency equals
Disk access+
Sender overhead +
Time of flight +
Message size/Bandwidth ** +
Receiver overhead
** Potentially misleading
E-Betting flow…
Accept & Place Bet
Odds Repository
Can User Afford Bet?
Valid Bet?
Bet rejected
Book Position/
Risk Monitor
100s of W
eb
Servers
No
Yes
No
Yes
DatabaseDatabase
…has many sources of latency
Accept & Place Bet
Odds Repository
Can User Afford Bet?
Valid Bet?
Bet rejected
Book Position/
Risk Monitor
100s of W
eb
Servers
No
Yes
No
Yes
DatabaseDatabase
Why worry about it
It Costs!
The cost of ignoring it is high, and its not just trading systems
• Amazon – every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales
• Google – an extra 0.5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%
• Financial – “If a broker’s electronic trading platform is 5 ms behind the competition it could loose them at least 1% of their flow – that’s $4 million in revenues per ms” (TABB Group)
Latency reduces revenue, causes losses and results in a poor end-user experience
Accept & Place Bet
Odds Repository
Can User Afford Bet?
Valid Bet?
Bet Rejected (Lost Revenue £££)
Book Position/
Risk Monitor
100s of W
eb
Servers
No
Yes
No
Yes
Difference in odds X amt.
DatabaseDatabase
Lost £££
Money is lost as bets are rejected ortaken at poor prices
Bet placed for £10 @ 10 to 1
Odds generated, odds offered 10 to 1
Bet booked, odds now being offered 5 to 1
End client wins
Payout is £100versus £50
In-running greatly amplifies this effect
Operating costs are high as architectureis inefficient
Accept & Place Bet
Odds Repository
Can User Afford Bet?
Valid Bet?
Book Position/
Risk Monitor
100s of W
eb
Servers
DatabaseDatabase
No
Yes
No
Yes
Difference in odds X amt.
Bet Rejected (Lost Revenue £££)Lost £££
Budgets are being wasted on OPEX rather than advancing the business via CAPEX
• 60-70% of IT budgets spent on operational costs (CIO Magazine)
• 5% of IT budgets spend on energy (BBC)• 1996-2006 no. of servers in London increased
from 6 28m. • Avg. power consumption of each increased from
150 400 watts.• In 2007 it was predicted London would run out of
power in 2009
“Latency Exists, Cope!” (Dan Pritchett)
Combating it:
Hardware or software?
Moore’s law hasn’t held up for hardware speed gains,
they are slowing
CPU Clock Speed, Moore’s law still exists (for how
long)but for different reasons –
plus Memory/RAM Wall broken
Ram Speed (limited to distance from CPU)
Desk I/O PS
Network
Speed of light
Sp
eed
Date
Bandwidth should also be a cause for concern…
• “Net bombs” are gobbling up the internet– YouTube = using the same amount of traffic as the
entire internet in 2000– iPlayer 5% of UK internet usage.
• Monthly internet traffic is running at 8 exabytes (million trillion) – one exabyte is equivalent of 50,000 years of DVDs
• 2007 traffic grew by 75%, capacity by 45%• Brownouts/jitters are due to start in 2010• What is the alternative?
How we tackle it
Faster software running on fewer machines
"Hardware can give you a generic 20 percent improvement in performance, but there is only so far you can go with hardware. “ Rob Wallos, global head of market data Citi
GemFire & Diffusion kill inefficiencies reducing costs and increasing revenue
GemFire looks after the first miles… …and Diffusion the last
Accept & Place Bet
Odds Repository
Can User Afford Bet?
Valid Bet?
Book Position/
Risk Monitor
DatabaseDatabase
GemFire
No
Yes
No
Yes
Difference in odds X amt.
Bet Rejected (Lost Revenue £££)Lost £££
Diffu
sion
In essence, a suite of low latency communication products
• GemFire allows you to create a highly resilient, elastic, enterprise data fabric to improve performance while simplifying your architecture.
• GemFire enables you to safe-store and receive data and events to and from any back-end data source and pass notifications off to Diffusion.
GemFire – Enterprise Data Fabric
In essence, a suite of low latency communication products
• Diffusion allows you to create a two-way secure real-time online channel between an organisation and its audience.
• Diffusion enables you to push and receive data and events to and from any current, or future, “net” connected device including the web browser.
Diffusion – the power behind the Net
Smaller messages optimally delivered, reducing latency and foot print
• Best Message Delivery (BDM)– Conflation– High/Low Water Marks– Throttling (could be used to level the ‘playing field’)
• Compression• Your own message format avoids unnecessary
transformation/serialization • Only send deltas - reduces size/amount of data sent• Hierarchical topics - reduces size/amount sent to finest grain• Connecting various devices – browser/mobile/interactive TV
etc.• These techniques can reduce bandwidth consumption
by up-to 80% and help achieve a better end-user experience
Hierarchical topics, in context of abetting exchange
Strong focus on performance & efficiency, driven from the server
• NIO technology ensures data moves through Diffusion & GemFire as quickly as possible
• Zero Copy• Zero Fan-out• Bi-directional, no need to open another socket
when sending information (executing a bet) back to the server as you would with a web request
• Scaling the application (massive number of clients on a single server)
• These approaches can massively reduce your hardware requirements
Global Edge Caching ensures most efficient client connectivity without replicating the whole application environment
Questions & Answers