Why might the asymmetric/partitioned model scale better than the symmetric model?
A financial application that matches buyers with sellers is an example of one type of application that we’ve seen. The application trades a set of financial instruments such as stocks. It tracks the buy and sell orders for each stock and attempts to match buyers with compatible sellers. It would also compare the buyers and sellers with prices from other exchanges and may route orders to an external exchange if that exchange is currently posting a better price. Orders should be processed in price order and if orders have the same price then they are processed in the order they arrived. Such a system might receive between 20,000 and 100,000 orders per day but would also receive between 500 and 2000 remote exchange prices/second (2 million prices/hour) and this volume is growing at about 40% a year. Clearly handling the prices volume is the main performance problem. Partitioned application can also better exploit SQL batching to significantly improve performance as they don’t need to worr
