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The new site goes live today, Thursday, June 17, and will initially offer latency statistics for the exchange’s ArcaBook Equities and OpenBook Ultra feeds in the US, measuring latency “between the point of feed assembly and the SFTI customer access point” in the 111, Eighth Avenue facility in New York where NYSE’s Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure maintains a datacenter, according to NYSE documentation.

Latencystats.com will provide latency statistics at rolling one-minute, hourly, daily and weekly intervals, and will include figures for average, peak and 99.9 percentile latency to give users insight into current and historic latency profiles for data distribution. The site will also provide average message rates for each time period, along with one-second and one-millisecond peak message rates to help users understand how many megabits per second of bandwidth are required to ensure sufficient headroom to minimize network latency, even under peak loads.

Corvil chief executive Donal Byrne says that one-millisecond peak message rates can sometimes be up to 1,000 times larger than average traffic rates, and are essential statistics for infrastructure capacity planning.

Byrne also says “this is the only time that an exchange has published the gap rate,” which tells users if any message packets have been dropped between the feed’s point of origin and the SFTI point of presence where clients source the data, enabling trading firms to determine whether missing message packets were dropped within the exchange’s or the client’s infrastructure, he adds.

NYSE Technologies and Corvil aim to continue enhancing the LatencyStats.com site by providing an increased depth and breadth of latency statistics, and more analytics to interpret that data, such as additional charting capabilities to plot latency profiles over time and a download function that enables users to analyze latency data in spreadsheets - though officials say development of the portal will be driven by client demand.

In addition, the data could include statistics for other markets and third-party service providers in future, which NYSE Technologies and Corvil will encourage to publish via LatencyStats.com, providing that they use a consistent methodology to measure latency - something that the industry is calling for to enable end users to make “apples-to-apples” comparisons of competing service providers, says Mark Schaedel, vice president of data products at NYSE Euronext and senior vice president of global data products at NYSE Technologies.

“We believe we are scratching the surface in terms of what we can do with this partnership, but we now want guidance from the user community in terms of where next to take this.... We want to make it an interactive initiative,” Schaedel says.