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We are constantly monitoring the vital signs of Wolfram|Alpha, and have been since the moment it went live. Traffic has held strong, with a sustained rate of hundreds of requests per second from all continents, and we’re now able to fine-tune our systems in ways that weren’t possible with simulated traffic.
We found that in some regions the site was not as responsive as it could be, and we are now in the process of rebalancing the load and continuing to problem-solve networking issues.
To date, we have made substantial progress on solving issues with our network, DNS, hardware, web server configuration, and databases.
As we continue testing Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve noticed that users occasionally receive a “Slow Script” warning when rendering Wolfram|Alpha pages. We hope to have a fix for this problem soon.
Please drop us a note if you experience performance snags or possible browser incompatibilities.
There seem to be no problem for me yet. Amazing service though.
Keep up the great work guys! I haven’t experienced any problems so far! (other then a few Space Odyssey references during load testing…)
I would like to see a graph of requests per day since startup.
Very responsive down in Mexico. I’m 64 and my company became the 8th Commodore dealer in the UK so many years ago. Thus it’s fair to say that I’ve seen a lot go past since then. This has to be one of the most exciting developments ever seen in 30 years of personal computing!
Can you put a blog up on that monitoring setup you have, and how it was put together? (software wise)
The setup that is shown in the Wolfram|Alpha Status Update May 16, 2009 video is amazing.
There are some browser incompabilities on IE5.5, IE6.0 and some others. Check the screens from ;
http://browsershots.org/http://www.wolframalpha.com/
thanx.
http://robertnyman.com/2009/02/09/stop-developing-for-internet-explorer-6/
Especially for 5.5. IE is a web developers worst nightmare.
IE5.5 came out mid 2000, IE6 2001. life goes on, dont worry about that. maybe its time for people to update their windows98 systems 🙂
A few guesses about your special sauce, and maybe some ideas for the future if you’re not doing these things already (some of them, I know you’re not doing):
It’s a valiant effort for certain, and it’s nice to see those pre-AI winter technologies actually solving real problems.
i’m still new to this service…
but keep up the good work…
I love how Wolfram|Alpha lets you in on the interesting technical details. Very interesting for a geek like me. 🙂
Glad to hear you’re on top of the “slow script” warnings. We at Mozilla had been wondering whose fault those were: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=493417
Here’s a strange performance issue I’ve noticed. Enter 10000! The input, along with the first two outputs indicating the truncated result and the number of digits appear fine. The next output times out. In particular, the decimal approximation (which appears for 1000!) never appears. This seems odd, since N[10000!, 66] runs in Mathematica on my machine almost instantaneously.
love it… amazing how you even get movie references for stuff like 88mph
How do I get a list of something like the USA GDP for the last 10 years?
usa gdp year 2001 works.
Repeat changing year as required. You will be asked to indicate if you want ‘Economic data rather than ‘International Data;
The large result pages (like this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+x^2+cos x +sin x +dx) are scrolled painfully slow on my box. I use Firefox 3.0.10. Maybe it’s irrelevant (it could be the problem of some of my add-ons or something), but still, I’d be glad if you paid attention to it.
Thanks for the great work!
Impressed, especially with the maths stuff. (so much so that I was surprised that it didn’t understand “area under the graph of” rather than “integral of”, which was quite unreasonable of me.)
There is still a bit of joining up to do in the chemistry section but much of the info is in there.
an integral represents much more than the area between a function’s plot and the x-axis
I am completely fascinated with this, and the possibilities it brings to light. Having done work with primitive AI attempts, I would love to plug this tool into some software and see what it does.
> browser incompatibilities
Drop down menus with arrow on left are broken in Opera browser, but not drop down menus with arrow on right works fine.
Example:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gravitation
— menu broken
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple
— menu works fine
Sub queries are as important to W|A as subroutines in a computer program.
So far the emphasis has been on simple questions though the answers are often limmense..
But there is a need for answers to complex questions such as “What is the cost of manufacturing a Ford Pinto”.
So we want to be able within a query to include sub-queries and they in turn to do the same.For example:-
Subquery1: Material Costs for Ford Pinto
Subquery2: Labour Costs for Ford Pinto
……..hundreds more subqueries,,,
and the final query would combine the answers:-
(Subquery1) plus (Subquery2) ……..?
also
A question frequently fails because it needs curated data or logic that W|A does not yet have. Stephen Wolfram expects it to take ten years to get close to overcoming this. It may also fail because W|A can not understand a particular word.
The solution is for W|A to ask the questioner what W|A is to assume in the particular case as a workaround .
A question could take the form “What is the sum of x plus y plus z?
W|A would reply “I don’t know the value of Z.”
The questioner would amend the question replacing z by tan absolute value.
If there were many such items the questioner might be allowed to give the name of a data field in his user profile and W|A would use that data.
this seems really good for me , no probleme 😀 , i juste wana thank you for your great innovation
Why doesn’t it show my IP when I ask for it? It’s so essential!
Anyways, good work – after the release I can see more and more work you’ve put in guys!
Good luck guys, wrote on how to add your services into web browser to help you out.
Keep it up
If I search for Scotland I get ‘assuming Scotland is a historical country’, then ‘input representation’ give me ‘Kingdom of Scotland’, dates 843 to 1707.
Mmm, this must be a different Scotland from the Scotland I’m sitting in at the moment. I know a lot of Scottish web folk who’re rather annoyed at the moment.
Also, I know the info returned is pretty basic but all I get for Queen Victoria is her full name and dates of birth and death. Shouldn’t there be info of where she was queen of?
Where’s the info coming from? Heriot-Watt university wasn’t founded in 1881 nor was the Scottish Agricultural College founded in 1906.
Also, if you search for the Earl of …, you get info on how many people are called Earl in the US at the moment and looking for info on the Duke of Windsor refers you to the city ‘Windsor’ or the university ‘Duke’
sterling pound comes up with flight times between cities- ditto kronar!
hard to input equations using fibonacci
atoms in universe?- no answer(!)
lonrho (on Aim) comes up inapposite
Respected sir !
Really amazing sir ! I am not enough age to wish you ! but i will give royal salute to your hard work !
your’s
K.S.Krishna.
India
Congrats my geek friends! Brazil is pleasead to announce that Wolfram is running perfectly! Thanks for this project!