Task Preemption

Task preemption is the act of temporarily interrupting a running task to allow another task with higher priority to execute. While necessary for general-purpose computing, preemption is a significant source of jitter in high-frequency trading systems.

If a trading thread is preempted by an OS background task, it may miss a critical market opportunity or fail to hedge a position correctly. To prevent this, trading systems often use non-preemptive scheduling or isolate the application on dedicated cores.

Controlling preemption is a key part of building a system that can reliably perform under the intense pressure of volatile cryptocurrency markets and rapid-fire derivatives trading.