Welcome to Vestris Inc.
Internet Interactive Solutions Company



Software Documentation

Chapter 2. Technical Questions

Table of Contents
Can Alkaline index 50 million documents?
Is it possible to customize Alkaline's search results display format, look and feel?
I don't want to index in background constantly, how do I setup a crontab?
What is the right way of stopping Alkaline? Is it ok to stop Alkaline with a Ctrl-C, kill -SIGTERM or kill -9?
I am not sure how to run the daemon. Once I logoff the machine, the daemon stops, why and how can I avoid that?
How do I know when my siteidx.* files are corrupt?
What is the memory consumption of Alkaline?
Alkaline consumes 100% of CPU. What can I do to limit the aggressive resource consumption during indexing?
Can I and how do I run Alkaline as an NT Service?
How does the priority scheduling work under NT and how to I reduce Alkaline's priority under Windows NT?
Why do some pages seem not to be indexed? The link is still present in the siteidx?.url file!
What is exactly a root password and why should I have one? Why is not enough to have an administrative password? This root password I need is the ordinary Unix root password I use on my Linux? Should I put it in global.cnf?
How do I setup Apache to call Alkaline?
Does Alkaline work with virtual servers?
Why does Alkaline seem to grow in memory?
How much memory does Alkaline really use? I don't understand the output from top, ps or the columns in the Windows NT Task Manager.
When I run Alkaline it suddenly crashes with a Segmentation Fault or a Bus Error message. Then it dumps a core file. What is this? Can I delete the core file?
When I look at netstat output after running Alkaline for some time, why do ports get stuck in a CLOSE_WAIT or TIME_WAIT state?
Why do I get "unable to bind, address already in use" fatal error?
I am moving from an NT server to a Linux box. Can I copy Alkaline databases from one system to another?
When I am running Alkaline, ps or top show me more than one process, why and what are those processes doing? Do 4 processes of 10Mb mean that a total of 40Mb of memory is consumed?
I have installed the search engine and made an index of my domain. But when I use the search-demo.html and try to search, a "Method Not Allowed" or "The requested method POST is not allowed for the url /index.htm" error message appears instead of search results.
How can I launch Alkaline each time my server restarts?
How many concurrent search requests (queries) does Alkaline support?
Does Alkaline work with proxies and firewalls?
Does Alkaline support refining results (searching from previous results)?
Do you provide an API to Alkaline so the product can be used in third party implementations?
Can multiple instances of Alkaline run on multiple ports with the same data files?
What is the right way to stop Alkaline?
My server is very loaded and Alkaline crashes every 24 hours. How can I improve server stability?
Apache logs are full of Alkaline's requests, can I avoid logging these?
Are there any security considerations for Alkaline? What is more secure, a CGI script or Alkaline?
Where is the admin section? I have problems navigating to the admin section? I get a password popup, a file not found, a blank page or a permission denied error.

Can Alkaline index 50 million documents?

There's a theoretical limit of two billion documents that Alkaline can index. Still, Alkaline is not designed for indexing that amount of data. We recommend to use Alkaline with something around 50'000-500'000 pages and 250'000 word forms, even though Alkaline will work for much bigger sites in case you add consequent hardware.

Alkaline has been successfully deployed with half a million indexed pages on a single server using a very accurate words exclusion dictionary.

A parallel version of Alkaline will of course easily break that limit, there's no ETA for that.