Abstract: Fault tolerant operation is disclosed for a primary instance, such as a process, thread, application, processor, etc., using an active copy-cat instance, a.k.a. backup instance, that mirrors operations in the primary instance, but only after those operations have successfully completed in the primary instance. Fault tolerant logic monitors inputs and outputs of the primary instance and gates those inputs to the backup instance once a given input has been processed. The outputs of the backup instance are then compared with the outputs of the primary instance to ensure correct operation. The disclosed embodiments further relate to fault tolerant failover mechanism allowing the backup instance to take over for the primary instance in a fault situation wherein the primary and backup instances are loosely coupled, i.e. they need not be aware that they are operating in a fault tolerant environment.

Abstract: Fault tolerant operation is disclosed for a primary match server of a financial exchange using an active copy-cat instance, a.k.a. backup match server, that mirrors operations in the primary match server, but only after those operations have successfully completed in the primary match server. Fault tolerant logic monitors inputs and outputs of the primary match server and gates those inputs to the backup match server once a given input has been processed. The outputs of the backup match server are then compared with the outputs of the primary match server to ensure correct operation. The disclosed embodiments further relate to fault tolerant failover mechanism allowing the backup match server to take over for the primary match server in a fault situation wherein the primary and backup match servers are loosely coupled, i.e. they need not be aware that they are operating in a fault tolerant environment.