For SharePoint and Dot Net Fans: The London Stock Exchange Case
September 13, 2008
Cyber cynic Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote “London Stock Exchange Suffers Dot Net Crash”. You should click here and read this well-written post. Do it now, gentle readers. The gist of the story is that LSE, with the help of Accenture and Microsoft, built a near real time system running on lots of Hewlett Packard upscale servers, Windows Server 2003, and my old pal, SQL Server 2000. The architecture was designed to run really fast, a feat my team has never achieved with Windows Server or SQL Server without lots of tricks and lots of scale up and scale out work. The LSE crashed. For me the most significant statement in the write up was:
Sorry, Microsoft, .NET Framework is simply incapable of performing this kind of work, and SQL Server 2000, or any version of SQL Server really, can’t possibly handle the world’s number three stock exchange’s transaction load on a consistent basis. I’d been hearing from friends who trade on the LSE for ages about how slow the system could get. Now, I know why.
Why did I find this interesting? Three reasons:
- There’s a lot of cheerleading for Microsoft SharePoint. This LSE melt down is a reminder that even with experts and resources, the Dot Net / Windows Server / SQL Server triumvirate get along about as well as Pompey, Crassus and Caesar. Pretty exciting interactions with this group.
- Microsoft is pushing hard on cloud computing. If the LSE can’t stay up, what’s that suggest for mission critical enterprise applications running in Microsoft’s brand new data centers running on similar hardware and using the same triumvirate of software
- Speed and Dot Net are not like peanut butter and jelly or ham and eggs. Making Microsoft software go fast requires significant engineering work and sophisticated hardware. The speed ups don’t come in software, file systems, or data management methods. Think really expensive engineering year in and year out.
I know there are quite a few Dot Net fans out there. We have it running on one of our servers. Are your experiences like mine, generally good. Or are your experiences like the LSE, less than stellar. Oh, Mr. Vaughan-Nichols asserts that the LSE is starting to use Linux on its hardware.
Stephen Arnold, September 13, 2008
Comments
One Response to “For SharePoint and Dot Net Fans: The London Stock Exchange Case”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
I believe the strength or weakness shown by a solution isn’t defined by the OS or programming language, but instead by “design”. Bad design in any OS or programming flavor will cripple performance. It’s too easy to play the performance card between *nix vs Windows. If someone says they went from Windows to *nix and it now performs better, what they aren’t telling you is it was a complete design rewrite, too.
I currently am part of a team that uses SQL Server 2005 with a database that is over 13 TB – at this size, the smallest bottlenecks become glaring rather quickly. My experiences with MS technologies are mostly good, same with *nix technologies. However, bad design can make both sides appear to be inadequate until you look deeper into a flawed design.
Robert