That’s a fair point, and I agree on wire-to-wire (SOF-in → SOF-out) hardware timestamps being the correct benchmark for HFT.
The current numbers are software-level TSC samples (full frame available → TX start) and were intended to isolate the software critical path, not to claim true market-to-market latency.
I’m actively working on mitigating the remaining sources of latency (ingress handling, batching boundaries, and NIC interaction), and feedback like this is genuinely helpful in prioritizing the next steps. Hardware timestamping is already on the roadmap so both internal and wire-level latencies can be reported side-by-side.
Appreciate you calling this out — guidance from people who’ve measured this properly is exactly what I’m looking for.
That number is for a non-trivial software path (parsing, state updates, decision logic), not a minimal hot loop. Sub-100 ns in pure software usually means extremely constrained logic or offloading parts elsewhere. I agree there’s room to improve, and I’m working on reducing structural overheads, but this wasn’t meant to represent the absolute lower bound of what’s possible.
It does not. If this was the case, round trip wire to wire latency below 1.0-1.2 microseconds in software would’ve been impossible. But it clearly is possible - see benchmarks by Solarflare, Exablaze, and others.
The traditional way to measure performance in HFT is hardware timestamps on the wire, start of frame in to start of frame out.
With those measurements the performance is probably closer to 2us, which is usually the realistic limit of a non-trivial software trading system.