LMAX aims to be the fastest trading platform in the world. Clearly, in order to achieve this we needed to do something special to achieve very low-latency and high-throughput with our Java platform. Performance testing showed that using queues to pass data between stages of the system was introducing latency, so we focused on optimising this area.

The Disruptor is the result of our research and testing. We found that cache misses at the CPU-level, and locks requiring kernel arbitration are both extremely costly, so we created a framework which has "mechanical sympathy" for the hardware it's running on, and that's lock-free.

This is not a specialist solution, it's not designed to work only for a financial application. The Disruptor is a general-purpose mechanism for solving a difficult problem in concurrent programming.

Astyanax is a Java Cassandra client. It borrows many concepts from Hector but diverges in the connection pool implementation as well as the client API. One of the main design considerations was to provide a clean abstraction between the connection pool and Cassandra API so that each may be customized and improved separately. Astyanax provides a fluent style API which guides the caller to narrow the query from key to column as well as providing queries for more complex use cases that we have encountered. The operational benefits of Astyanax over Hector include lower latency, reduced latency variance, and better error handling.