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There’s Something Happening Here – NYTimes.com
“There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide.”
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Mechanical Sympathy: Single Writer Principle
Single Writer Principle
When trying to build a highly scalable system the single biggest limitation on scalability is having multiple writers contend for any item of data or resource. Sure, algorithms can be bad, but let’s assume they have a reasonable Big O notation so we’ll focus on the scalability limitations of the systems design.I keep seeing people just accept having multiple writers as the norm. There is a lot of research in computer science for managing this contention that boils down to 2 basic approaches. One is to provide mutual exclusion to the contended resource while the mutation takes place; the other is to take an optimistic strategy and swap in the changes if the underlying resource has not changed while you created the new copy.
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disruptor – Concurrent Programming Framework – Google Project Hosting
What is the Disruptor?
LMAX aims to be the fastest trading platform in the world. Clearly, in order to achieve this we needed to do something special to achieve very low-latency and high-throughput with our Java platform. Performance testing showed that using queues to pass data between stages of the system was introducing latency, so we focused on optimising this area.
The Disruptor is the result of our research and testing. We found that cache misses at the CPU-level, and locks requiring kernel arbitration are both extremely costly, so we created a framework which has “mechanical sympathy” for the hardware it’s running on, and that’s lock-free.
This is not a specialist solution, it’s not designed to work only for a financial application. The Disruptor is a general-purpose mechanism for solving a difficult problem in concurrent programming.
