Friday, July 22, 2011

LMAX and the benefits of keeping things in memory

I've now read Martin Fowler's review of the LMAX architecture and I feel good. This is very similar to what I've been doing for a long time with messaging (Spring Integration, Camel, AMQ, RMQ etc.).

LMAX is an event driven architecture. The Input Disruptor can be your favourite messaging broker. The Business Logic Processors are your message queue consumers. AMQP can certainly attain the goals described for the Output Disruptor (targeted consumers etc.).

The only thing "disruptive" about this article is that it introduces new terminology. I accept that there's probably a lot of optimisation going on, but from an architectural standpoint I don't see anything revolutionary.

Perhaps the most interesting points of the LMAX architecture are that everything is done in memory and that the processing of data is kept close to the data. These are things that we will all no doubt agree on being the main influence on performance.