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Sunday, March 30, 2008

How Bytes Add Up

I've been working on a process which handles hand summarizes trade data from multiple markets. During development I didn't take much time on memory calculations because the structures used were light weight and the bulk of the data was persisted to a flat files.
With a code review approaching fast, I guessed it was time to do some mathematics. The result...

Worst case scenario

Market Count = 20
Instrument Count = 1000 (per partition)
Time = 8hrs. = 3600 * 8 s = 28800 s

Total Memory = 28800 * 20 * 1000 * 16 = 9,216,000,000B = 9.2 Gb


Yep..Even though this is the worst case, the figure was unacceptable. So I had to find a way to prove that in reality, the memory consumption of my process would be less.

The secret lay in the number of trades which occur on a given day. For the 10 or so markets that we connect to, this would be around 10 million. I took this down to 5 million to be on the safe side and it changed the result drastically.

Trade Count = 5,000,000

Memory = (16 * 5000000)B = 80,000,000 b = 80 MB

For the worst case, the trade count would be;

Trade count in order for this memory level to be reached = 28800 * 20 * 1000 =

576,000,000 = 576 million

So I can safely say that my process would operate at between 100MB and 1GB as long as the trade count remains below 50 million... Since it's unlikely that we will be receiving this many messages any time soon, the current architecture could be used for a long time to come.

If this fails we'll have to go for plan B, which is to move our indexes into files, and cope with having to do 2 file reads for each data segment retrieval...



Thursday, March 27, 2008

Importing a resource from one MFC project to another

God only knows how I hate MFC. When I first came across it I was already a sort of a veteran at C# and .Net and had quite a bit of experience developing front ends using these technologies. My first impression on MFC was "Maaaaaan!!! this feels AAAAAnnnnnnncient". Yep... But since it was the platform being used at our company I had to learn to live with it...

So, it happens that I'm developing a front-ends for a product(I'm mainly a back end developer :)) and it has to be customized for different projects. Recently, I made an enhancement in one project and now I have to do almost the exact same thing for another one. Importing the controls from the original project seemed like the obvious solution.


It was a surprise to see how easy it was to do this in VS6. The steps are;

* In VC6, pick "Open" from the File menu.
* At the very bottom of the open file dialog is a combo box labeled
"open as", which says "Auto" by default.
* Change that so it says "Resources" instead.
* Locate the resource file, select it, and hit open
* Drag and drop the required control from the main window to your resource view.

These steps were adequate for me to get the control integrated with all the control IDs properly assigned. But sometimes the IDs might get reset to some meaningless numeric values. In that case, those would have to be renamed manually by going to the "Properties" of each control.

(Thanks to Katy Mulvey who provided this excellent guide down at the devX forum. Link)