CEO's Blog

Blog Entry of Wednesday, May 20 2009 in Networking Basics, PRTG 7

Monitoring the Birth of a Search Engine - Wolfram|Alpha Goes Online

Over the last weekend the engineers of Wolfram Research gradually launched their new search engine Wolfram|Alpha (or should I better say "knowledge engine"). We monitored their website during this launch with PRTG Network Monitor and here are the results!

What is Wolfram|Alpha?

Alpha is not a search engine like Google. Alpha allows you to access terabytes of "curated" data -- data that's been hand-selected by experts working with Wolfram -- by entering a few related keywords. The results can be really amazing! Alpha's Examples by Topic webpage has some interesting links.

More about Alpha:

• Wolfram Alpha: A new kind of search engine (Los Angeles Times)
• Wolfram Alpha Acts as a 'computational Knowledge Engine' (PCWorld website)

The Launch of Alpha...

The Wolfram|Alpha Blog says:

"Wolfram|Alpha went live in test mode at 8:48pm CST on Friday. Our teams worked intensely through the weekend to complete load testing, fix bugs, [...] By late Sunday night, we were able to test all compute clusters at full capacity."

... and how we saw it with PRTG Network Monitor

We started monitoring www.wolframalpha.com on Saturday (using probes of our cloud monitoring system www.cloudclimate.com). Here are our observations:

From San Francisco, CA:

From Cologne, Germany:

For this test we ran an Alpha query every 5 minutes. Times are given in CET (GMT-06:00).

We can see that during Saturday May 16th and Sunday May 17th, even into Monday the answering times were fluctuating between 1.500 ms and 8.000 ms. It is likely that Wolfram's own load tests (mentioned above) were the reason for these spikes. Since Monday May 18th afternoon the answering times have stabilized (e.g. at 2.000ms from Cologne, Germany) and no more hickups were discovered by PRTG. This is impressive because since Monday the Alpha website must have seen a lot of traffic triggered by press coverage around the globe.

From our monitoring perspective the launch of the Wolfram|Alpha website was successful and an impressive engineering job.