SCALABLE PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING FOR REAL-TIME FINANCIAL TRADING PLATFORMS

Samson Precious Loveth; Iyiola Ifeoluwa Johnson; Awogbade Kehinde; Omisope Abiodun Oluwasegun; Asiyanbola Olaoluwa Ebenezer.

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21501759

Abstract

Real-time financial trading platforms need to maintain sub-second and even microsecond response times and scale to support spikes of market activity, which can be orders of magnitude greater than normal levels of throughput. This article looks at scalable performance engineering as a discipline to design, construct, and operate such platforms. The article brings together architectural patterns — event-driven pipelines, lock-free concurrency, zerocopy serialization, kernel-bypass networking, and tiered horizontal scaling — that have impacts on latency, throughput and reliability, all inspired by software performance engineering theory, distributed-systems practice, and the market-microstructure literature on latency in electronic markets. A reference architecture is proposed and qualitatively assessed, based on benchmark evidence reported by industry and academia. It discusses the tradeoffs between raw speed optimization and correctness, auditability, and regulatory compliance, and the marketdesign response which takes the approach of reframing the scalability problem at the market level rather than only at the system level, including frequent batch auctions and speed bumps. The article concludes that scalable performance engineering for trading platforms is better thought of as a continuous quantitative discipline, not a one-time optimization exercise, and part of the entire lifecycle of the system.

Keywords

performance engineering; low-latency systems; real-time trading platforms; scalability; distributed systems; market microstructure; event-driven architecture; high-frequency trading

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