Windows NT/2000

Under Windows NT, a real access to the machine is required, such as you are able to open a command prompt and execute programs. On Windows 2000, a terminal server or rclient access is sufficient. Ability to install and run services is required to target Alkaline for deployment in production environments. IIS or other web server is absolutely not required.

UNIX Operating Systems

On UNIX, a telnet or ssh access is required. It is absolutely not required to have root access to the machine; a normal user is sufficient. Apache or other web server is absolutely not required.

Hardware Requirements

Alkaline runs on any 32bit hardware running one of the supported operating systems, including Sun SPARC Family Workstation or Server, Dec Alpha, or Intel compatible PC with a Pentium class processor. Exclusively 64bit processors are not supported although Alkaline will run on some 64bit natively capable machines.

As the cheapest hardware configuration, we advise running Alkaline under a UNIX platform rather than a Windows NT 4.0 or below. If you are choosing a server, a Pentium III Linux machine with over 128MB RAM will be a fair choice. Most Linux versions, such as Redhat 6.0, are known to be good at running Alkaline.

For Windows NT based configurations, a Windows 2000 server with 256MB RAM is an excellent choice. We have extensively tested Alkaline with Windows 2000 multiprocessor machines and have been pleasantly surprised. New versions of Alkaline (since March 28th, 2000) use a different memory manager under NT which helps avoid heap fragmentation. Performance and stability are both better than on equivalent Sun machines.

Ultimately, for intensive commercial needs, choose a Sparc Ultra Server running Solaris or a Windows 2000 multiprocessor server.

Supported operating systems currently are (this might differ slightly depending on hardware availability to us, which customers provide on a voluntary basis):

• Sun Solaris 2.5 and above / SunOS 5.5.x and above

• Windows NT 3.5 or 4.0

• Windows 2000 Workstation or Server

• Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, Debian or Suse Linux x86 Glib or Libc

• Redhat 6.0 or Suse 6.1 Linux Alpha

• SGI IRIX 6.5 and above

• FreeBSD 2.x and above

Physical Memory requirements vary depending on the size of the index you plan to have.

• 1'000 pages / 100'000 different word forms: ~4 MB

• 10'000 pages / 200'000 different word forms: ~32 MB

• 50'000 pages / 250'000 different word forms: ~64 MB

• 50'000 pages / 450'000 different word forms: ~128 MB

• 500'000 pages / 500'000 different word forms: ~256 MB

These numbers should not be taken as absolute. Alkaline has a built-in swap which can allow it to function under tight memory constraints. For example, on a machine with only 32 MB of RAM, you can very well load and search Alkaline's half a million pages index. If your machine has a lot of memory, you might see much higher memory usage numbers because Alkaline will always attempt to page as little as possible.

There are no special requirements for swap space, having as much physical memory as possible is strongly recommended and performance will considerably degrade with more swap space and less RAM. About 25 MB of disk space per 50'000 pages and 200'000 different word forms is required when running with the native swap enabled. About 10-20% of physical memory usage will be used by Alkaline's private swap for temporary files in this case.

Any standard TCP/IP network is required and absolutely no web server, such as IIS or Apache, is required.