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I hear that banks swear by this software but fail to understand the use within the financial software.

Lets say a company receives a low latency data feed from a provider such as Thomson Reuters how do they distribute this data feed to all their traders so it appears on their screen in real time.

Is this the main use of Tibco RV?

Adam Medi
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RV is a multicast protocol so when a stock tick is published on an RV subject it is received by all listeners on that subject. The is different to TCP which is a unicast (point to point) protocol.

So if I have 1000 traders on my trading floor...instead of setting up 1000 differebt TCP connections to their workstation and sending through a stock tick (or a thousand stock ticks)...all I need is to send one RV message and it goes to all listeners at once. This is very fast and very cheap in network resources. Hence why RV is used on trading floors.

There is more on multicast versus unicast messaging here: What are the differences between Tibco EMS and Rendezvous

Community
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scaganoff
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  • Hi scaganoff, two questions: 1, how do I check/set the ttl for the messages on a subject(effectively the queue)? 2, Tibco advertises the RV implementation has a "no copy" solution for large fanout system - how is that even possible? For details about the two questions, please check out: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28853565/tibco-rv-message-lifetime-no-copy-for-fanouts Thanks a lot – h9uest Mar 04 '15 at 13:51
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Multicast (RV) and store-and-forward (MQ, EMS, JMS,etc) are 2 different mechanism to integrate components. They are used for different purpose. RV is mostly used for small packets, speed is more important than reliability, 1 sender multiple receiver kind of environment while MQ and EMS are used for its reliability which back office is needed. You won't sweat when one of your price is lost on the wire but you will be in trouble when one trade was lost due to hardware failure. Using RV will make your code depends on TIbco API while MQ and EMS comply with standard JMS API makes queue broker easier.

ying
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Yes, the main advantage of TIBCO RV over others is that it's built on UDP multicast. That means one IP packet for 500 consumers is really sent out on the wire only ONE time. With TCP it would be sent out 500 times !

UDP by itself is pretty unreliable (packet loss, network storms, etc). So TRDP or PGM (the protocols implemented by RV) add reliability to this traffic. And the API's make it much simpler to use RV than raw UDP or TCP.

Because the API is so simple and available on many platforms, it was also used for integrating applications in the back office. Nowadays, for integration purposes, it is replaced more and more by TIBCO EMS or other JMS providers.

Axel Podehl
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  • I thought reliability was implemented in TCP by re-sending lost packets. How is reliability implemented in UDP if the message only gets sent once? – Stewart Aug 14 '18 at 14:47
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    Well, the details of TRDP, this layer over UDP, are proprietary (I don't know them), but I would imagine that UDP is used for the good case: no message loss - this is probably enough in 99.9% of the cases. If, however, a sequence number is missing a client would request a private resent over TCP. If there is more than one failing cient, e.g. after a subnet failure, that resent should probably go over UDP. – Axel Podehl Aug 16 '18 at 10:22