In web development, you scale by adding threads. In high-frequency trading, adding a thread is a death sentence.
The solution is the LMAX Disruptor: a lock-free ring buffer where a single writer thread publishes events and multiple reader threads consume them without any locks, mutexes, or CAS operations. Cache lines are padded to 64 bytes to eliminate false sharing. The result is 6 million orders per second on commodity hardware.
The full article covers: complete Disruptor implementation walkthrough in C++ and Rust, cache-line alignment techniques, kernel bypass from NIC to matching logic, and how to benchmark your own matching engine with nanosecond-resolution profiling.
Understanding matching engine architecture is foundational to understanding why the signing latency of your key custody solution matters — if you can match in 50ns but sign in 147ms, your signing infrastructure is 3 million times slower than the matching logic it serves.