The London Stock Exchange opened for business 07:00 GMT on Monday, September 8, but was forced to close shortly after, due to failure of the Microsoft-based TradElect system to allow connections. LSE reopened at 13:00 GMT, a half hour before closing time:
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSL01084620080908?sp=true The TradElect system was apparently installed in June 2007, and is designed to handle increased volume of transactions: http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-live/843/Default.aspx I believe what hapened here is similar to what happened to the Asia-Manila Regional Programming Contests of the ACM-ICPC in 2003 and 2004, held at the University of Asia and the Pacific. In 2003 there were about 65 teams participating, and in 2004, 80 teams. UA&P was using Windows XP as PC^2 server, which accepted source code submissions from the teams, and allowed the judges to get those submissions and check them for correctness. All this was done in an online contest, which in 2003 involved 65 team clients, 8 judge clients, 2 scoreboard clients, and one admin client. All these clients are connected during the contest to the single PC^2 server. During the last 30 minutes of the contest every team wants to submit as many of their program source code as they can, to beat the deadline, even if their programs are not working, in the vain hope that the judges will score their wrong programs right. Naturally, the poor Windows XP PC^2 server choked and blue-screened, and needed to be restarted. And this was repeated in 2004. Medyo nakakahiya. When Ateneo took over the Asia-Manila Regional Programming Contest in 2005-2006, we solved the connectivity problem by using a lightly- configured Fedora. We removed most of the services, and left only those needed to run the Java-based PC^2 server program, namely the portmapper, udevd, hal and other essential services. In particular, we removed the X-window graphical interface. In 2006, more than 120 client computers were connecting, and we never had a connectivity problem. A properly configured Fedora did the job that a Windows XP box could never hope to do. The BSD TCP/IP stack is known to be the most rubost networking stack in the world, and most Unix-like operating systems, including Fedora- Linux, use this. I do not know what Windows uses, because, as you and I know, Windows is NOT open source. Pablo Manalastas _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
