How Does Listening to a Multicast Hurt Me?

Question

I'm receiving a recovery feed from an exchange for recovering data missed from their primary feed.

The exchange strongly recommends listening to the recovery feed only when data is needed, and leaving the multicast once I have recovered the data I need.

My question is, if I am using asio, and not reading from the NIC when I don't need it, what is the harm? The messages have sequence numbers, so I can't accidentally process an old message "left" on the card.

Is this really harming my application?

Answer 1

It's likely not harming your application so much as harming your machine - since the nic is still configured into the multicast group, it's still listening to those messages and passing them up, before your software ignores them and they get discarded. That's a lot of extra work that your network stack and kernel are doing, and therefore a lot of extra load on the machine in general, not just your app.

Answer 2

Listening to your recovery feed could also have a potential impact on a network level. As pjz mentioned, your NIC and IP stack will have more frames/packets to process. In addition, more of your available bandwidth is being used up by data that is not being used by your application; this could lead to dropped frames if there is congestion on your link. Whether congestion is likely to occur depends on whether your server is 100Mb or 1Gb attached, how much other traffic your host is sending/receiving, etc.

Another potential concern is the impact on other hosts. If the switch your host is attached to does not have IGMP snooping enabled, then all hosts on the same VLAN will receive the additional multicast traffic, which could lead them to experience the same problems as mentioned above.

If you have a networking team administering your network for you, it may be worth seeking out some recommendations from them? If you feel it is necessary to subscribe to a redundant feed, it would seem prudent to work out what level of redundancy already exists in your network and how likely it is that messages on the primary feed will be lost.

Answer 3

An addition to muz's comment...

It's unlikely that this will make any difference to your system, but it's worth being aware that there is an overhead associated with maintaining a multicast membership (assuming that you're using IGMP - which is probably reasonable given the restriction about "leaving the multicast")

IGMP requires the sending and processing of multicast group memberships at regular intervals. And (as alluded to in muz's comment) if you have any switches or routers between you and the multicast source that are capable of igmp snooping then they are able to disable the multicast for a given network.