[spelunker]

I think you can take off your tinfoil hat. Lots of price movement motivates more traffic to the exchanges, resulting in DDoS.

As the bitcoin market grows GDAX, Bitfinex, etc are probably going to have to borrow some ideas/talent from NASDAQ & other big electronic exchanges to stabilize things.

[Snackchez]

Tinfoil hat off!

Shouldn't an exchange be able to handle volume? Seems like a basic requirement.

Regardless, I still believe that with the introduction of shorts, were going to see bigger swings.

[joshuahedlund]

> Shouldn't an exchange be able to handle volume? Seems like a basic requirement.

Exchanges have incentive to handle as much volume as possible to make as much via fees as possible, but no site can handle infinite volume. The coinbase app has been climbing the iTunes charts into the top 20 the last couple days. Just before the site went down the price was running up by hundreds of dollars per minute, attracting tons of trader traffic trying to profit from it. Even if they have basic scaling measures in place for the basic infrastructure, they most likely experienced unprecedented exponentially increasing volume that was inevitably bound to break something

[user5994461]

Judging by the GDAX runbook, they barely have a couple of orders per second. They can't have performance problem at this scale.

I've seen exchanges running 10 or 100 times that amount with no problem, ran by only a couple of graduates out of school.

Either way, doesn't matter. Exchanges have no performance problem, it's a big queue, you just queue requests.

[eropple]

In my capacity as an infrastructure/scaling consultant I've spoken to multiple exchanges. Without disclosing anything I'm prohibited from, my strong expectation is that almost every exchange can't handle traffic spikes.

They're not all shitty me-too Rails apps built by junior engineers who figured "how hard can it be?". But most of the ones I've seen are.

[cortesoft]

Clearly it isn't a basic requirement because they exist without being able to handle volume.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> Shouldn't an exchange be able to handle volume? Seems like a basic requirement.

Exchanges are just websites like any other. They're build to handle a certain amount of traffic based on the average amount plus a little extra to handle spikes.

If they only get (And I'm pulling numbers out of my ass here just to make a point) an average of 10 trades per second with occasional spikes to 100 trades per second, how much infrastructure should they build? What capacity should they build to? 1,000 trades per second? 10,000?

There's a cost analysis involved. I think it's a bit unrealistic for them to have enough infrastructure to handle spikes an order of magnitude higher than their typical peak loads.

[spelunker]

I agree, they _should_ be able to, but lots of times performance is a 2nd priority behind getting shit out the door - for better or or for worse.

I'm sure as they grow they'll harden their systems and/or do a total rewrite. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing it already since the big boys are starting to show interest with futures.

[wereHamster]

> handle volume

But what levels of volume? 100 quadrillion trades per nanosecond? Sure they could scale their infrastructure to those levels, but why? You overprovision, get estimate your worst-case scenario and work towards that. But in the end, if there is a huge rush, like a 10000% increase or more, even the largest exchanges would break down.

[mortehu]

US stock exchanges don't run websites on which you can trade. However, during the flash crash in 2015 I was unable to place trades on either of the two brokerage sites I used at the time (USAA and Vanguard), probably due to other people rushing in to trade like myself.

[castis]

I imagine they've spent a lot of time already beefing up their infrastructure, you can anticipate high loads but until you know what that looks/feels like, you cant compensate for it. They'll get there eventually. It'll just take some time.

[tomp]

No, most stock exchanges aren't exposed to the public like bitcoin exchanges are.