Martin Fowler has posted an excellent overview of the LMAX architecture which helps put the use-cases and key considerations that led to the LMAX disruptor pattern in context.

Good to see some focus being put on the programming model that LMAX uses as well. While convention suggests that to get the best performance you have to make heavy use of concurrency and multithreading, the measurements LMAX did showed that the cost of contention and communication between threads was too great. As such, the programming model at LMAX is largely single-threaded, achieving the best possible performance while avoiding the complexities of multithreaded programming.