Live data from Hacker News

Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

code.google.com

31–40 of 45 posts

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#31

The sense that the app store has been a neglected, second-tier priority is deep enough now that it will take them a while to regain significant developer trust. AWS is very close to a de-facto standard now. Edit: I mean app engine, the hosted web service. Not the app store. Thanks.

app store has been a neglected

I guess you are confusing the Google App Engine's App Gallery : http://appgallery.appspot.com/, which has been removed for some reasons and the Google Apps Marketplace : http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace, which is the actual App Store, where you could pay and install apps.

App Gallery was just a GAE application show-case center, and most likely was causing confusion to Google Apps customers too.

I am still a developer who trusts GAE (my app was on the appgallery and is also listed on marketplace) and believe that they will continue to compete for developer mind-share, as they proved yet again with this performance update.

Let go of the fear, uncertainty & doubt and hop on to try an app. You will like it too.

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#32

It's still too early to tell. This would not be the first time that speed improves after a maintenance and then it slowly gets worse every week until it looks almost like before the maintenance.

Is it possible that the degradation in performance is due to more developers building more apps and driving more traffic to App Engine as time goes on?

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#34

The sense that the app store has been a neglected, second-tier priority is deep enough now that it will take them a while to regain significant developer trust. AWS is very close to a de-facto standard now. Edit: I mean app engine, the hosted web service. Not the app store. Thanks.

I agree. However I hope they do regain that trust b/c app engine is a far more pleasant platform to develop on.

Can't repeat this enough: the main reason I develop on appengine is that it removes server admin headaches completely from the equation. Ok, you get other headaches in return, but most of the time it's stuff I can deal with.

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#35

Our app ( http://gri.pe ) feels a lot snappier after this latest bit of datastore maintenance. We've been using as much memcache as possible to avoid datastore access because prior to this maintenance, datastore access was spiky and even the simplest of queries had a small chance of timing out. I can say for sure that some of our datastore-heavy cron jobs were taking > 200ms, but are around 70ms now. It's a shame tha…

Unrelated question: how are you doing those cron jobs. I tried using the task queue, but it kept timing out on me, even when I broke my tasks into smaller ones (couldn't figure out a threshold as the behavior of the datastore was totally unpredictable).

Via Cron Jobs ? http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/cron.htm...

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated question: how are you doing those cron jobs. I tried using the task queue, but it kept timing out on me, even when I broke my tasks into smaller ones (couldn't figure out a threshold as the behavior of the datastore was totally unpredictable).

Via Cron Jobs ? http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/cron.htm...

Quote from that article:

     A URL invoked by cron is subject to the same limits 
     and quotas as a normal HTTP request, including 
     the request time limit.
And I'm looking for some tips and tricks to do heavy processing (which is really needed when working with non-relational datastores).

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#38
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Via Cron Jobs ? http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/cron.htm...

Quote from that article: A URL invoked by cron is subject to the same limits and quotas as a normal HTTP request, including the request time limit. And I'm looking for some tips and tricks to do heavy processing (which is really needed when working with non-relational datastores).

The key is to combine cron jobs with Tasks. Tasks are am easy to use and powerful feature of Google Appengine that let you deal with the standard limitations. For example, rather than doing some operation on 1000 entities in one request, you spin off 1000 tasks, each handling the operation on one entity. Read up about them at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/

You can also explore the new Mapper API at http://blog.notdot.net/2010/05/Exploring-the-new-mapper-API

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#39
post #33

Good news but I really hope Google figures out how to solve DeadlineExceededError. They are popping up from time to time for my app ( http://www.knowcase.com ) and I don't think it's datastore related.

This reply from a few days back should shed some light on the issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823362

Re: Google App Engine is now much faster, after latest maintenance

#40

Our app ( http://gri.pe ) feels a lot snappier after this latest bit of datastore maintenance. We've been using as much memcache as possible to avoid datastore access because prior to this maintenance, datastore access was spiky and even the simplest of queries had a small chance of timing out. I can say for sure that some of our datastore-heavy cron jobs were taking > 200ms, but are around 70ms now. It's a shame tha…

It's a shame that the stats for > 12hrs ago seem to have been wiped. I bet we'd be seeing a marked improvement on our ms/request stat.

Just click the left-facing arrow next to the date. Here are the stats for 11/5: http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...

and here are the stats for 11/4: http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...

Post reply on HN