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by zeroxfe 1060 days ago
T + 2day is ridiculous. T + 1ms is also ridiculous (speed of light and all.)
2 comments

Apologies if I’ve misunderstood you (edit: I have) but assuming you are saying that 1ms to transfer funds between banks is ridiculously slow, why do you say that?

Light travels about 300km in one millisecond in a vacuum, about 200km in optical fiber. The best achievable theoretical fiber optic RTT for NYC-LA is about 35-40ms. In practice 65ms+ is more realistic due to routing overhead and the fact that cables aren’t always laid in a great circle. This being a financial API with three parties involved in most transactions (the two banks and the fed clearinghouse) there is sure to be more than one round trip involved for TLS establishment, authentication, verification of funds and account availability etc, many of which involve traversing many inevitably complicated systems on each side. It would shock me if such a system could realistically target anything less than 500ms P50.

I believe the comment you replied to was suggesting that 1ms is infeasibly fast.
Ah, thanks! In that case feel free to interpret my reply as intended for GP.
This is the most hacker news conversation ever.
Yeah like who the f*ck cares if their bank transfer takes 1 second or 1 millisecond.
Retail High-Frequency Trading.

Maybe I should delete this comment before someone gets an idea and starts selling their get rich quick course.

Some transactions can be rolled back asynchronously.

There are physical bank note, database from different system in trust or untrusted parties that need to be cross checked and reconsolidated

Not sure it's even useful to call it a "transaction" at that point, since nothing has been transacted. It feels like the difference between updating a value in-memory and committing a value to the database. Maybe you can hide the latency, but that hasn't removed the need to actually do the transaction, eventually, and now you have the added problem of managing consistency.