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Performance Architectural Strategy

publish date: 2026/06/11 07:37:12.020241 UTC

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A financial trading platform has performance as its most critical non-functional requirement - it must process thousands of trades per second with minimal latency. Which architectural strategy is recommended?

Use fine-grain, self-contained components distributed across many machines to maximize parallel processing

Use a layered architecture with security validation at each layer to ensure reliability

Localize critical operations within a small number of large components all deployed on the same computer to minimize inter-component communications and network overhead

Store all data in a central repository so that all components share consistent state

Correct Answer

Localize critical operations within a small number of large components all deployed on the same computer to minimize inter-component communications and network overhead

Explanation

When performance is the critical requirement, the architectural strategy is to localize critical operations within a small number of components, with these components deployed on the same computer rather than distributed across a network. This reduces the number of component communications and network overhead. Using few, relatively large components rather than many fine-grain components is also recommended to reduce communication overhead.

Reference

Software Engineering, Ian Sommerville, 10th edition

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