Corvil Unveils Expanded Latency Tools

"You can just put this at the end of a datafeed... to analyze that feed and compare two providers of the same feed," without any reliance on the market data providers themselves, says Corvil chief executive Donal Byrne.

The new support for monitoring latency of specific message types, rather than simply studying message packet latency, enables the vendor to monitor latency "at a message layer, a packet layer and an infrastructure layer," Byrne says.

CorvilNet 5.1 supports a number of message formats-including the FIX and FAST protocols, and proprietary formats used by CME Group, the London Stock Exchange, NYSE Arca, Nasdaq's MOLD protocol and Icap's EBS foreign exchange market-and the vendor can now "code up pretty much any message decoder we need, depending on the situation," he says.

Corvil has also enhanced roundtrip latency measurements for order messages transmitted using TCP-IP, which it can now monitor continuously to produce a detailed latency profile, rather than relying on a single reading at setup. This capability also includes a feature that can eliminate "noise" created by exchange servers that process incoming order messages immediately, but generate delayed acknowledgment messages.

"Delayed acknowledgments produce a completely wrong reading, so we had to invent a way to overcome that and derive an accurate result," Byrne says.

Corvil has also configured CorvilNet to leverage multi-core, 64-bit chip technologies to increase application performance. "We have a never-ending scale challenge of adding more and more functionality, which means that we need to use more cores, faster memory and... the latest hardware," he says.