Michael been building C++ systems professionally for over 25 years. He started in data compression, developing algorithms such as M99, M03, and MSufSort. For the past decade he has worked in finance as a principal engineer and software architect, building low-latency infrastructure for high-frequency trading. His interests include performance engineering, lock-free concurrency, and algorithm design.
Selecting which ready source to service next is the core scheduling task in low-latency systems. The conventional approach routes that decision through queues; however, fan-in queues concentrate contention and throughput degrades under load, and priority usually compounds it - adding complexity. Polling avoids some contention but injects jitter and wasted cycles. This talk deep-dives into Signal Trees: an alternative lock-free, low-latency readiness scheduler that sidesteps queue-centered degradation at scale and eliminates the need for polling entirely. We start with measurements - scaling, tail percentiles, and service distribution - showing up to 40× higher throughput than queue-based schedulers under contention, then […]