A little while back I said that LMAX ran around 11,000 end to end tests in around 50 minutes. Since then we’ve deployed some new hardware to run our continuous integration on, plus continued building new stuff and are now running about 11,500 tests in under 20 minutes.

A large part of the speed boost is extra VM instances but also the increased RAM allocation available to each VM has allowed us to increase a number of limits in the system and we can now run more tests concurrently against each VM instance.

We’re currently running 61 instances of the exchange using virtual machines hosted by four Dell FX2s chassis three-quarter populated with FC630s. That gives us 480 cores and 4.5TiB RAM. That’s certainly no small investment, but we consider it excellent value for money because of the boost in productivity and confidence it gives our development team (not to mention the boost in confidence and reliability it gives our clients).