Did bufferbloat cause the 2010 flashcrash?

Thu Aug 6 17:31:18 UTC 2015

On 8/6/15 9:58 AM, Christopher Morrow wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 12:51 PM, John Kristoff <jtk at cymru.com> wrote:
>> It would seem surprising that delays in general due to long queues
>> would not have been noticed before, since or would have caused other
>> more far reaching problems.
> 
> bufferbloat is the boogieman... of late. I think that's foolish :(
> I think this comment from jtk is really on point though! 'why only
> then?' that sure seems convenient, eh?

The queuing like the RBC dudes were doing was in order transmission not
on the wire. given wires of various lengths having the request arrive on
different exchanges at different times based on  distance was considered
unedesirable (by people loooking to reduce the opportunity for arbitrage
on latency).

I have have minimal experience with trading platforms but what switch
vendors were selling us as a latency sensitive customer (and HFT shops
at time) were broadcom or fulcrum asics which by virtue of being
cut-through are essentially minimally buffered.

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Did *bufferbloat* cause the 2010 flashcrash?

Did bufferbloat cause the 2010 flashcrash?