Performance and Technology Folklore

Over the last 3 years at LMAX we've been building a high performance financial exchange. A task that has brought a lot of interesting challenges. Our most interesting discovery is that the software industry is rife with mythology and folklore when it comes to performance. In an effort to bring back science and rational thought to software development, this talk will attempt to dispel the common myths that we have encountered. It will be a deep dive into a number of areas of software development including distributed systems, concurrency and parallelism, I/O, algorithms, garbage collection, and memory efficiency.