Data distribution fairness: is TCP and websocket a good choice?

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I am learning about servers and data distribution. Much of what I have read from various sources (here is just one) talks about how market data is distributed over UDP to take advantage of multicasting. Indeed, in this video at this point about building a trading exchange, the presenter mentions how TCP is not the optimal choice to distribute data because it means having to "loop over" every client then send the data to each in turn, meaning that the "first in the list" of clients has a possibly unfair advantage.

I was very surprised then when I learned that I could connect to the Binance feed of market data using a websocket connection, which is TCP, using a command such as

websocat_linux64 wss://stream.binance.com:9443/ws/btcusdt@trade --protocol ws

Many other sources mention Websockets, so they certainly seem to be a common method of delivering market data, indeed this states

"Cryptocurrency trading applications often have real-time market data streamed to trader front-ends via websockets"

I am confused. If Binance distributes over TCP, is "fairness" really a problem as the YouTube video seems to suggest?

So, overall, my main question is that if I want to distribute data (of any kind generally, but we can keep the market data theme if it helps) to multiple clients (possibly thousands) over the internet, should I use UDP or TCP, and is there any specific technique that could be employed to ensure "fairness" if that is relevant?

I've added the C++ tag as I would use C++, lots of high performance servers are written in C++, and I feel there's a good chance that someone will have done something similar and/or accessed the Binance feeds using C++.

network-programming websocket tcp c++
1 Answers

The argument on fairness due to looping, in code, is ridiculous.

The whole field of trading where decisions need to be made quickly, where you need to use new information before someone else does is called: low-latency trading.

This tells you what's important: reducing the latency to a minimum. This is why UDP is used over TCP. TCP has flow control, re-sends data and buffers traffic to deliver it in order. This would make it terrible for low-latency trading.

WebSockets, in addition to being built on top of TCP are heavier and slower simply due to the extra amount of data (and needed processing to read/write it).

So even though the looping would be a tiny marginal latency cost, there's plenty of other reasons to pick UDP over TCP and even more over WebSockets.

So why does Binance does it? Their market is not institutional traders with hardware located at the exchanges. It's for traders that are willing to accept some latency. If you don't trade to the millisecond, then some extra latency is acceptable. It makes it much easier to integrate different piece of software together. It also makes fairness, in latency, not so important. If Alice is 0.253 seconds away and Bob is 0.416 seconds away, does it make any difference who I tell first (by a few microseconds)? Probably not.

userCYLi0
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