The LMAX disruptor and Baker's Treadmill
A new retail financial trading platform called LMAX recently published their work on new software technology for low-latency servers that they call the "disruptor": We have noticed a striking similiarity between their disruptor and an old garbage collection algorithm from 1992 called Baker's Treadmill : The LMAX disruptor and the story behind it are very interesting in their own right and well worth reading up on. In their system, binary messages come from the "receiver" and are distributed to the "journaller", "replicator" and "unmarshaller" in parallel and the "unmarshaller" then passes on the deserialized messages to the "consumer". The core of their idea is to accomplish all of this message passing using a single shared data structure, the disruptor, rather than using several separate concurrent queues. Baker's Treadmill is a low-latency garbage collection algorithm. Allocated blocks in the heap are li...