As part of scaling BitMEX, we will be taking the following actions:
The BitMEX platform will halt trading on November 9 at 18:00 UTC for a database upgrade. We expect this upgrade to take 10 minutes. Once the platform is back online, we will notify via Twitter, enter a cancel-only period for 5 minutes, and trading will resume. The following additional changes will be made:
- The tick size on XBT products will be increased from 0.1 to 0.5 USD, and on XBJ products from 1 to 100 JPY. If you are using automated tools, please ensure they are aware of the change and submitting/amending with the proper tick size. Orders with an incorrect tick size will be rejected. These changes are already on Testnet. If you have existing orders at the time of the change, they will be amended away from the mid to match the new tick size.
- To help improve responsiveness during high-load periods, the BitMEX trading engine will begin load-shedding when requests reach a critical queue depth. When this happens, you will quickly receive a 503 status code with the message “The system is currently overloaded. Please try again later.” The request will not have reached the engine, and you should retry after at least 500 milliseconds.
- We will be migrating the trading engine to a newer server with a more modern, higher-frequency processor. We expect this to give us a roughly 25% performance improvement.
All of these changes will improve quality of service dramatically during high load. Traders will receive immediate feedback about overload and can choose to resubmit or amend, rather than waiting many seconds for an order to execute or fail.
We are working daily to improve engine throughput during high-volatility periods and we appreciate your support and use of BitMEX. As always, if you have questions or comments about our API, please reply to this email.