Gigaspaces curbs latency outliers with Java Real Time
Today, most banks have migrated their internal software development from C/C++ to the Java language because of well-known advantages in development productivity (Java Platform), robustness & reliability (Garbage Collector) and platform independence (Java Bytecode). They may even have gotten better throughput performance through the use of standard architectures and application servers (Java Enterprise Edition). Among the few banking applications that have not been able to benefit yet from the Java revolution, you find the latency-critical applications connected to the trading floor. Why? Because of the unpredictable pauses introduced by the garbage collector which result in significant jitter (variance of execution time).
In this post Frederic Pariente Engineering Manager at Sun Microsystems posted a summary of a case study on how the use of Sun Real Time JVM and GigaSpaces was used in the context of of a customer proof-of-concept this summer to ensure guaranteed latency per message under 10 msec, with no code modification to the matching engine.