I fixed a problem in the Trader Desktop Performance console I posted last week: Using the AIR client and the RTMP channel, the message latency started to increase when the application was deactivated (lost focus)… Background: When an AIR application loses focus, the AIR 2 runtime lowers the frame rate of the application to a smaller value to prevent the application from using unnecessary CPU resources if it’s running in the background. Because of the current dependency between frame rate and RTMP message processing, this behavior is not appropriate for our Trader Desktop application when using an RTMP channel, because it would significantly reduce the number of real time messages the application can handle. This would lead to a rapidly growing queue of messages waiting to be processed, and the message latency growing out of control. The fix is to force a higher frame rate on the “deactivate” event of the WindowedApplication.

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In the last few months, I’ve seen an explosion in the number of Financial Services firms interested in building Real Time Trader Desktop applications using Flex and LiveCycle Data Services.

The new Quality of Service features available in LCDS 3.x (guaranteed message delivery, message throttling, etc) have contributed to this intensified interest. But for many real time applications, performance is what matters most. So, in addition to adding and improving features, we also spent a lot of time running benchmarks and optimizing performance. Damon has been blogging about this recently. The tests he describes are mostly “server-focused”. They answer the question: How many messages per second can the server push to how many clients with what latency? In one of the scenarios tested, the answer was a total of 400,000 messages per second spread over 500 clients with an average latency of 15 milliseconds.

Another more “client-focused” question customers have asked me is: How many messages per second can one client consume and render with what latency? To answer that question, I built my own Performance Console and feed generator.

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I’m in London this week and will make a stop at Skills Matter on Thursday for a free event at 6:30pm… I’ll be presenting on Flex 4, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst, LCDS 3.1, Mosaic, etc. More info here. No, I didn’t come up with the title of the session

I hope to see you there if you live in the area.

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