The Hindu Business Line : When every second counts

Users of online trading sites must be pretty used to seeing this message on their computer screens after they put in a buy/sell call pertaining to a stock. But then, by the time the transaction is through, the prices would have moved in such a way that one is unable to transact at the price of one’s choice.

And on days when your brokerage firm receives more than 10,000 orders in the first five minutes of the trading session you would not be able to trade for anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour!

Brokerages such as Reliance Money are trying to address this problem from their end by increasing the total number of trades possible on their Web portal by re-writing some of the applications that support the portal’s IT infrastructure.

“Right now, our portal can process 80-85 trade orders per second. We have managed to scale this to up-to more than 200 orders per second in the test environment,” Nagaraj G.N., Senior Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer, told eWorld.

“By February this year, reliancemoney.com will be able to support more than 200 transactions per minute from 80-85 transactions per second currently,” he says.

Even if it’s a bull market, like the one witnessed in October 2007, the portal would not record more than 170-180 trades per second.

Thus, even when trading activity is in full swing, the Reliance Money web portal will have spare capacity to process more orders.

And this has been achieved by re-writing the source code of the risk management software and the order validation engine, which processes every trade call, he says. (The software has been developed by ReligareTechnova Global Solutions Ltd (formerly Asian CERC Information) on Microsoft’s platform.)

“Religare Technova and RMoney spent about three months in tuning and testing the source code of the application. Microsoft advised us on which parts of the code need to be re-engineered,” says Nagaraj.

In order to test the ruggedness of the improved system, RMoney invested in a tool from HP called the HP load runner, which simulates load on applications and measures how the source code behaves when subjected to the load.

“The Loadrunner also points back into the code and shows which areas of the code should be improved for enhanced endurance,” says Nagaraj.

Reliance Money, he says, spends 8-12 per cent of its total costs on information technology.

But then there is little that brokerages can do if the feed from the stock exchanges gets delayed. “A couple of microseconds delay from the stock exchange site can actually translate into a 4-5 second delay in process. In most cases, it translates into an eight-second delay. Add to this latencies related to broadband speed and the effect could be pretty cascading,” he says.

adith@thehindu.co.in

Related Stories:
Union Bank, Emkay in pact for e-broking
Motilal Oswal, IDBI Bank team up for online trading facility
Reliance Money launches security token in online trading

More Stories on : Stock Markets | E-Commerce & E-Business | Software

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