Local and global quality of service shaper on ingress in a distributed system

A method of operating a distributed data processing system to control inbound flow of messages from a plurality of gateway nodes to a plurality of compute nodes and to a system-level node, wherein the distributed data processing system is an electronic trading system, and the messages are electronic trading messages, the method comprising:

• at each of the plurality of gateway nodes:
• receiving the messages over one or more client connections;
• controlling a sustained flow rate and/or a burst flow rate of the messages on a per-client or per-connection basis;
• and
• forwarding the messages to the system-level node;
• at the system-level node:
• receiving the messages from each of the plurality of gateway nodes;
• controlling a system-wide message flow rate, wherein controlling the system-wide message flow rate further comprises controlling a sustained flow rate and/or a burst flow rate on a per-gateway-node-basis for each of the plurality of gateway nodes;
• and
• forwarding the messages to the compute nodes;
• at each of the plurality of compute nodes:
• receiving the messages from the system-level node;
• and
• operating on the messages to perform an electronic trading function;
• at a selected one of the compute nodes:
• generating a response message;
• and
• returning the response message to a selected one of the gateway nodes;
• and
• at the selected gateway node:
• returning the response message over at least one of the one or more client connections.