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It was a showcase for Digital's high-end Alphaservers. "The Hardware Behind AltaVista AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk. AlphaStation 500's

It was a showcase for Digital's high-end Alphaservers. "The Hardware Behind AltaVista AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk. AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site. They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends queries to the Web indexer and News indexer. Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful computer built by Digital. These servers run the query engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most requests take less than a second. Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web indexer. Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory, 180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and serves as a central distribution point for new index data. News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it serves is much smaller than the Web index. News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of you who don't want to know about news servers but want to read news. "[0] [0] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI

NikkiA 3y ago
'Tru64' would likely date this as being after Altavista's hayday, when it'd still have been called 'DEC Unix', or more usually 'OSF/1' if you were differentiating from Ultrix.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Probably. I don't remember when Altavista's "heyday" was. Tru64 was after Compaq bought DEC in 98.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    96-98 really, google rapidly ate their lunch after launching in the back end of '98. I'll grant I remember still occasionally using altavista in 99, but google had very much become my primary search by then, and the same was true for pretty much everyone I knew. I have a vague recollection of compaq closing it down shortly after buying it, then reopening it after some outcry - coinciding with it changing URLs from being the subdomain off digital.com. Of course, Lycos, inktomi and others were all vying for attention around then too.

NikkiA 3y ago

'Tru64' would likely date this as being after Altavista's hayday, when it'd still have been called 'DEC Unix', or more usually 'OSF/1' if you were differentiating from Ultrix.

sillywalk 3y ago
Probably. I don't remember when Altavista's "heyday" was. Tru64 was after Compaq bought DEC in 98.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  96-98 really, google rapidly ate their lunch after launching in the back end of '98. I'll grant I remember still occasionally using altavista in 99, but google had very much become my primary search by then, and the same was true for pretty much everyone I knew. I have a vague recollection of compaq closing it down shortly after buying it, then reopening it after some outcry - coinciding with it changing URLs from being the subdomain off digital.com. Of course, Lycos, inktomi and others were all vying for attention around then too.