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.