Reference Architecture v3: The Earnings-Burst Path

Not financial advice. Verify claims independently.

How the reference pipeline handles a 20x quote burst — annotated, component by component.

The earnings-burst scenario, component by component:

Ingest — exchange feed via binary protocol; buffering at the edge absorbs the burst
Normalize — fast-path for hot symbols (dedicated thread for MU Wednesday)
Shard — symbol-routed to dedicated Valkey channels (per RFC-001)
Fan-out — per-connection write queues; drop-tail on slow consumers
Client — buffered render; stale-detection marks if feed pauses >2s

The single point of failure to kill: a shared write loop that processes connections serially. One slow client stalls everyone. Per-connection queues are the fix.

Full diagrams + load-test results on the repo. Stock Picks runs v3 in production.