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The early prototype of HotBot aka Inktomi was done in AOLserver (then called NaviServer). I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, Tcl was the new Perl and embedded
by asah 7y ago
The early prototype of HotBot aka Inktomi was done in AOLserver (then called NaviServer). I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, Tcl was the new Perl and embedded scripting was the new CGI.
For production scaling, we rewrote it in multi-threaded C++ running on Sun hardware. This was not only pre-AWS but you had to build your own machine room, which meant severe constraints on budget and physical space: getting a world-scale service into a single rack was the difference between success and failure.
Anyway, AOLserver and Tcl rocked, other than performance, no complaints at all for this use.
- mysterydip 7y agoHotBot was my go-to search engine before Google got popular, so thanks :) The article seems to imply AOLserver ran pretty well (28,000 hits per second in the late 90s), and AOL used it with their users. How many hits were you getting that it didn't work? Or was it the nature of the workload (presumably db queries for search results) that were the bottleneck?
- edanuff 7y agoHotBot launched in 1996 and IIRC, was already on the C++ webserver and not on AOLServer at launch.
- gnachman 7y agoYou had to write C code for anything compute-intensive. TCL was precompiled to VM and was as fast as TCL can be. aol.com ran it for a while. Eventually other properties like digital cities used it with a bunch more optimizations that I wasn't directly involved in.
- mapgrep 7y agoWoah, I remember Inktomi. So was this a group run by Eric Brewer? My first email account was on a Sun in Evans basement at OCF. I believe it (the account) is still operative. Albeit on Linux now.