[erlang-questions] trading systems

[Joel Reymont]

Kenneth,

On Oct 1, 2009, at 4:50 PM, Kenneth Lundin wrote:

> It would be nice if you could explain what the system needs to do  
> and after that
> why you think it is a problem to store prices in an ETS-table.
> [...]
> Why are you talking about mmapped files? Please explain for a novice
> in trading systems.

It's high-frequency trading systems I'm talking about. Where's Serge  
Aleynikov [1] when you need him?

I'd like to process an incoming price quote, make a decision and  
submit a trade order with minimal latency. I know that this is  
normally done using C++ (or OCaml [1]) but I'm wondering how this can  
be achieved using Erlang.

Minimal latency is usually achieved by hitting the CPU cache as  
frequently as possible and minimizing memory copying overhead. ETS  
copies memory and I suspect it's use of the cache is rather poor by  
virtue of being a "hash table" and pointing all over the place in  
memory.

A simple array of floats or doubles groups data together in memory and  
is very cache friendly. I figure that an Erlang binary is the closest  
I can get to an array in Erlang. mmap-ing a file of floats or doubles  
and wrapping it in a binary should avoid unnecessary copying of data  
from disk to memory.

I think operating on binaries representing mmap-ed files of price  
quotes is as close as you can get to low latency in Erlang. I know  
that premature optimization is the root of all evil but I'd rather  
have my teeth pulled than optimize Erlang. This is speaking from  
experience. I figure a much better way is to choose a concept that  
guarantees fast code from the start.

	Thanks, Joel

[1] http://www.puppetmastertrading.com/blog/2009/07/08/the-other-interesting-thing-about-the-serge-aleynikov-story/

---
fastest mac firefox!
http://wagerlabs.com