Small Footprint

software with small footprint and less hungry on memory

Special care has been taken to keep the compiled code of Grapeshot as small as possible. This may seem like a pointless exercise in an era when even the smallest computers seem to have huge amounts of primary and secondary storage space, but there are, nevertheless, still clear advantages to having small code. It takes less time to load. It makes the code easier to maintain, and build on. Search becomes a small extra add-on for any piece of software wishing to incorporate it.

To give an idea, on Linux the complete Grapeshot code currently compiles to an executable module of size 187K. The Muscat 3.6 system, which was also regarded as very compact in its time, compiles to 962K. But Grapeshot has a far wider functionality than Muscat 3.6.

Grapeshot is particularly small and fast. The size of any software code impacts memory overheads. In software, smaller is better, if you still get the same functionality. As it happens benchmark tests show Grapeshot is also much faster than Lucene and some leading Bayesian-based software products. Grapeshot delivers "implicit querying" and all the personalisation, automatic categorization and agent alerting functions; whilst Lucene delivers a more traditional keyword search system with no dynamic Bayesian mathematics behind it.

Commercial Opportunity

A mobile or laptop device is usually used today as a dumb terminal, always pointing to a remote server to access web services. But, as download music, email, and pictures all aggregate on users' devices - there will be the need to run localised search routines to keep the index or catalogue up-to-date.

Grapeshot delivers immense probabilistic functionality at a fraction of the code size - the full system is less than 300k and can use less than 300k of RAM in full operation. There is now the opportunity with Grapeshot to run background search and indexing services without loading the CPU or having detrimental impact on the user's experience of their own personal desktop, mobile interface or webspace.