Hacker News Reader

HotBot 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?

View on HN

You 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.

HotBot launched in 1996 and IIRC, was already on the C++ webserver and not on AOLServer at launch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com