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Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

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Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#71

Post by raverbashing »

codeka wrote: post #65
raverbashing wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Caveat emptor Also, Khan academy receives funding from Google ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_academy ), so I don't think it boils down to only having a Premier account.

"You just have to pay for support and you get support? I don't believe it, there must be more to it than that!" Whether you believe it or not, a Premier account is what you need if you want support. You could argue that $500/mo is too expensive, but it is what it is.

Oh, I believe you can pay and get support

What I don't believe is that the support provided by Google is good or sufficient. Based on experiences with paying Google Apps, I'd say it's not.

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#72

Post by EwanToo »

okku wrote: post #44

I am also a GAE-user, I have had no problems like the OP. But I start to miss a fundamental feature, sockets. I have worked around it by using other services and polling. Maybe wrong forum, but is there any infrastructure templates for setting up a scalable web/db/loadbalancer/memcached for a simple tradional webservice, in my case a game? I want to be able to sleep at night, and easily scale up by adding some more m…

Depending on your budget (isn't it always..?), speak to Rightscale - they provide a set of frameworks to deploy infrastructure to various cloud platforms, and can handle auto-scaling and all that stuff.

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#73

Post by justin66 »

afhof wrote: post #14
log0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple comments mentioned that this occurs in HRD as well.

Only one other comment mentioned the problem with HRD as the datastore.

And the guy having the problem with HRD doesn't count because ... ?

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#74

Post by mrerrormessage »

It happens that 9 AM Brussels time is midnight pacific time. I'm sure Google is running some maintentance cron at midnight thinking "This is a low demand time," and it is, across the US, but not in Brussels. These are old instances, and Google probably doesn't want to re-time or rewrite the cron job to be more efficient.

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#75

Post by mos »

Customer support of Google really sucks! Currently the GAE cloud has a reliability problem (also for new customers). Instances are restarted like crazy. This leads to downtimes. But that's not enough. Customers have even to pay more(!) instance hours because of this. There is the running gag on the mailing-list: "Whenever GAE is unreliable for weeks Google needed to make revenue targets ;-)"

References

Current Issue: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=88...

Same issue from last year that took weeks to be resolved (check last comments!): http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=80...

Some Pros and Cons of Google App Engine in this blog-post: http://www.mosbase.com/

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#76

Post by PostOnce »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #42

Google support is an absolute disgrace. I had a Nexus 7 go AWOL at Christmas and I've never had such a shambolic customer service experience. They have absolutely no respect or customer service ethos when it comes to people who are actually paying them real cash money. Not in a million years would I sign off on hosting a production project on App Engine.

Google support borders upon the farcical. It doesn't appear to be costing them too much money in the grand scheme of things, which is sort of surprising to me.

I had a support guy tell me I had to get Apple's legal team to contact Google so I could use the "Mac" trademark, because I happened to be selling a piece of software that ran on OS X. Like that's ever going to happen. My ad simply said "Try ____, a better way to _____ on Windows and Mac.", linking them to http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/guidelinesfor3rdparties... didn't quite cut it, apparently, even though it clearly states that such use is acceptable under "2. Compatibility" near the top of the page. i.e. I can say my product runs on Mac if in fact it runs on Mac.

Approving a ten word ad takes Google over a week, in my experience. Baffling.

All this with their adwords $100 free trial. All that trial did was convince me that I should never ever in the life of the universe commit any money to Google, because they made it starkly apparent that I would never get what I paid for... running honest ads for honest products in a reasonable timeframe. I went with other ad networks in the end and had zero trouble whatsoever, and infinitely faster approval times. I suppose I may have had a smaller audience, but the headaches Google causes aren't worth the extra money.

Someone is going to come along and pull the rug out from under Google eventually. You can't rest on your laurels forever.

/rant

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#77

Post by zwischenzug »

I manage the 3rd line support of some of the busiest websites in the world (we provide back-end e-commerce software).

I can't say I think much of google's response here. Nearly two weeks before the first comment, and then shut down after 2 days and a question directed at who knows who, and no explanation?

The analysis elsewhere on here suggests they're violating SLA, so this should get more attention. I'm guessing support is under-resourced @ google, and the culture of support is a bit shabby (no acknowledgement of inconvenience or indication or evidence of work undertaken in the background) - hardly surprising for a large-scale software business based on free services.

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#78

Post by jrochkind1 »

jfoster wrote: post #66
meaty wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were a VPS customer, you'd be less locked in and can just walk to another vendor so they actually are shit hot with support usually. It was obvious when I first tried it that GAE has crappy support.

What are we actually talking about when discussing "good support" and "bad support"? Is it just someone nice to talk to whilst someone else fixes a problem for you? There was an interesting article along these lines by the former President of Enterprise at Google written recently: http://gigaom.com/2013/01/26/the-delusions-that-companies-ha... In this case, the GAE feature that underlies this issue is the Master/Slav…

Maybe you don't rationally need someone to talk to when someone is fixing a problem for you -- but I think you need to know that the vendor is _aware_ of the problem, and is working on fixing it.

Or you start freaking out. And I don't think that's entirely irrational.

This is, among other things, why the 'post mortem' has become somewhat popular -- because it allows us to judge "Yeah, those guys DO know what they're doing, they're on top of things, the chances of outages are getting constantly smaller, not larger."

Has Google ever published such a "post-mortem" after an outage? Has Google ever even admitted there was an outage publically?

But also, yeah, rational or not, people like to have someone to talk to. In customer service in general, there are many studies showing that customers satisfaction will be higher when they are treated 'nicely' _without a solution_ than when they are treated brusquely but their problem is solved. This is not actually rational, and I'm not saying I'd like vendors to strive towards that model -- but it is apparently human psychology that vendors may want to take account of.

On the other hand, Google seems to be doing pretty fine how it is going. Although I don't know how GAE is doing, really, compared to competitors.

How Google does it, though, is basically no support at all, right? It's beyond 'good support' or 'bad support' -- with the possible exception of AdWords, is there any Google product where you can ever talk to a human about any support issue at all? For email that might be fine, especially when the email product is pretty darn reliable. For enterprise critical software... it would sure make me nervous.

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#79

Post by logn »

Ironlink wrote: post #45
benjaminwootton wrote: post #42

Google support is an absolute disgrace. I had a Nexus 7 go AWOL at Christmas and I've never had such a shambolic customer service experience. They have absolutely no respect or customer service ethos when it comes to people who are actually paying them real cash money. Not in a million years would I sign off on hosting a production project on App Engine.

This customer is complaining about a service component which has been deprecated since almost 11 months ago. There is a tool which migrates application data from the old datastore to the new one. When you don't move off of deprecated infrastructure, I'd say you've set yourself up for problems.

11 months huh? That's barely anything for larger enterprise customers, about long enough to make it onto a project plan. Most enterprise software companies will provide support for 5-8 years.

Re: Issue 8788 - Every day around 9 AM Brussels time, huge drop in GAE performance

#80

Post by brudgers »

thijser wrote: post #33
Confusion wrote: post #9

Well, the bug report doesn't really invite quick attention. Simply reporting your observations is not enough: you should position yourself as a competent customer, by explaining what you have done to ensure the problem isn't on your side. Mention the code hasn't changed, that you have no database cleanup cronjobs or similar running that could be interfering, etc. My first instinct when I see a report like this is: he…

We filed a more concise bug report too: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8... This is a daily outage that affects all our master/slave appengine applications. We know these applications are 'deprecated', but we're still paying significant money for the service and therefore hadn't expected 'deprecated' to mean 'won't be fixed when there are problems'. Migration to HRD is not trivial even wit…

Shedding responsibility for problems arising from continued use is pretty much the essential rationale for deprecating a piece of software. Google has never appeared particularly concerned about backward compatibility or facilitating small segments of its customer and user bases.
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