About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Exclusive: A Preview of Benchmarks for Tibco’s FTL 1.1

Subscribe to our newsletter

Las Vegas is the destination this week for many Tibco users attending its annual Tucon event. The highlight for many might well be a show by 90s rockers Train at the big party on Wednesday night. But for all of us in the low-latency world, the focus will be on Tuesday’s keynote, when benchmarks for the recently released version 1.1 of FTL messaging will be announced. And here’s a little preview …

The bottom line is that compared to its 1.0 release, the 1.1 offering provides a big latency reduction for both intra-server and inter-server communications.

For intra-server, latency is reduced from 384 nanoseconds to 318. For inter-server using InfiniBand and RDMA, it’s down from 3.1 microseconds to 2.2. Both those numbers relate to marketing-friendly 16 byte payloads.

But for more realistic financial markets payloads, the numbers are still pretty good. For example, benchmarking 128 byte payloads, intra-server messaging is 354 nanoseconds, while InfiniBand RDMA is 3.4 microseconds, and 10gE RDMA is 4.14 microseconds.

For its 1.1 benchmarks, Tibco used a dual socket HP DL 380 server, with Intel Xeon 5687 chips, clocked at 3.6GHz. That compares to the 1.0 benchmarks run on a dual-socket Dell C6100 server, with Xeon 5670 chips running at 2.93 GHz.

But according to Tibco’s senior product architect for messaging Bill McLane, the server platfom had little impact on the improved performance. The work done by Tibco itself, particularly on optimising the code paths of the messaging APIs and on network transports, led to most of the latency improvement.

Also new in 1.1 is a graphical interface for FTL’s Realm server, used to design and administer an entire FTL environment.

At Tucon, Tibco will also provide some details of FTL 2.0, which will focus on improved performance and better administration tools to accelerate real life deployments. It is slated for release before year end.

Tibco execs aren’t yet naming any customers for FTL, though a case study at Tucon featuring the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Intel gives one pointer in that respect.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

Nasdaq Suspends High-Speed Trading Service Amid Regulatory Scrutiny

Nasdaq has halted a high-speed trading service following concerns raised by competitors and regulatory scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The service, which offered select clients access to lower-latency hollow-core fiber optic cables, was not publicly disclosed and had not undergone the SEC’s rule-filing process. Low-latency network provider McKay Brothers brought the...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 14th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Applications of Reference Data to the Middle Office

Increasing volumes and the complexity of reference data in the post-crisis environment have left the middle office struggling to meet the requirements of the current market order. Middle office functions must therefore be robust enough to be able to deal with the spectre of globalisation, an increase in the use of esoteric security types and...