GC issue with QuickFIX/J

Question

We are creating a low-latency Java application with QuickFIX/J . We are subscribing to around 50 currency pairs so we are getting around 4000000 ticks per day. This is because we are getting them from different liquidity providers.

I am seeing lots of GC happening and at peak time our application is hanging and not responding. I have tried with with 64 GB heap and also tried with G1 for GC but no success. Can you please suggest how I can solve this issue?

Did you face this issue earlier and what GC optimization have you done?

Should I move from QuickFIX/J and try with some other FIX engine? Can you please suggest some open source/commercial FIX engine which can fulfill my requirement?

Presently I am using Java 7. Would moving to Java 8 be helpful?

Answer 1

If we assume that you have a 8 hr working day you get 138 ticks/second per average. I'm well aware that it is the extremes that count but this is all we got. 138 ticks/seconds should not be a problem at all. We get that x100 every day with a 2 GB heap without a problem. Chances are, you have a memory leak. Do you have gc logging going? If you do not, install it immediately.

These are the flags we use:

-Xloggc:/gc-$(date +"%0d-%0m-%y-%0k%M").gclog -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC -XX:+PrintTenuringDistribution -XX:+PrintGCApplicationStoppedTime -XX:+PrintGCCause

GC logging has very small performance impact. If you post the gc log once you got it, we can take it further.