High-Performance, Highly Scalable Price Delivery

Trading Technologies’ new price architecture, PFX, is designed to excel under the extreme peaks of expected market data volume and volatility, both today and in the future. PFX maximizes the speed of price delivery, minimizes the size and number of price messages and achieves faster price recovery in packet loss scenarios. The result is optimal price scalability under maximum load.

PFX Benefits

PFX puts fewer bytes and fewer messages on the wire versus previous TTAPI price architecture. Proprietary compression algorithms yield more efficient byte-for-byte message packing, and eliminates the need to sequentially process individual price deltas on either the server or the client.

This leads directly to faster client processing, with fewer drops and fewer price message recovery incidents for both non-coalesced and coalesced prices. In addition, coalesced price streams utilizing PFX are less bursty, with coalescing timers now granular down to one millisecond.

TT tested the new TT CME 7.6 Price Server (with PFX On/PFX Off) against the TT CME 7.5 Price Server (with TTAPI). Network statistics indicate PFX results in a large reduction in the size and number of price messages sent.

Superior Overall Performance

The benefits of PFX over TTAPI include:

• Scalability – PFX requires less bandwidth under heavy price data traffic and reduces network congestion issues due to resynchronization of the price stream.
• Reliability – In the case of a price API disconnect, the PFX price stream can immediately recover. A re-subscribe is not needed to re-join the price stream.
• Speed – PFX matches native TTAPI under normal load. Under peak load, PFX yields faster performance and reduced variability.
• Ease of Migration from TTAPI to PFX – PFX-capable gateways can be configured to output either PFX or TTAPI wire format. PFX-capable clients may receive and process PFX prices, TTAPI prices or both depending on how the data is delivered.

PFX-compatible versions of all TT client applications are available now. TT gateways for major markets will be delivered in coming months. To find out more about how PFX can help you maximize your TT trading experience, contact your local Trading Technologies representative.