[Quickfix-developers] 4.2 MessageCracker/MessageFactory efficiency

[Rick L. <ric...@gm...>]

Greetings,

We were recently taking a look through the FIX42_MessageCracker and
MessageFactory code (we're using the .NET wrapper for Quickfix)  to see if
we could make some improvements in our order routing internal latency.  We
noticed that in both crack() and create()

1) it was doing string comparisons for the message type (when for FIX 4.2
all message types are a single character)
2) it was doing if-statements rather than a switch statement
3) the if-statement for ExecutionReport (which is the most frequent type of
message) was 30th in this list!

So we figured we could speed this up substantially by:

1) creating a switch() statement (that is constant time) instead of 60 or so
if-statements and
2) simply switch on the int value of the character (since we know it's only
1 character)

However, in practice, we haven't noticed any speed gains and we almost seem
to think we're seeing *slower *performance (this is tough to measure because
we have to measure in conjunction with WireShark to see how long the message
was outside our server (transit latency) and subtract that from the measured
time in code).

We're wondering if perhaps we aren't doing something correctly at compile
time, if anyone has seen these if-statements and thought the same thing we
thought, and if anyone has any input in general here.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Rick

P.S.  I'm not sure what the process is (it's been so long now) but if you
could add dan...@ti... to the mailing list so it will accept emails
from him.  Thanks again.