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

code.google.com

101–110 of 129 posts

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

#101
BTW, this issue is not simply a due to MS, it also happens on HRD. So any google support apologists here, please read the BUG thread submitted by this poor customer before dismissing it simply as a 'migration issue'.

I have had some issues with Google Docs (paid for premier commercial account). Some documents we had stored simply vanished from our account. After getting the run around for 3-4 days, finally a google engineer tolds us they can't help us recover the documents THEY 'lost' unless we have the URL to the document ... Thankfully someone on our team had kept the URL when I first shared that document with them (1+ year after the document had been created).

Nightmare ...

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

#103
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Because we don't implicitly trust everything everybody says on the Internet just because they suggest Google is bad.

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

#104

> I'm going to assume everyone experiencing this issue is using M/S. Upgrading to HRD will solve your issue. This is the reason I abandoned AE and part of why adopting a platform that isn't standardized is incredibly dangerous. The problem is technical debt constantly accrues even when you aren't making changes . Even though the API was unchanged, HRD differs subtly enough that breakage can occur on any non-trivial p…

If you've been running a 1997-era Perl app unmodified --including the operating system of the machine it's running on, and security patches to Perl in the mean time -- you are so owned and I really hope you're not storing any important data on that box.

I'm not saying that App Engine is a panacea, but regardless of how you write your code and what technologies you use, there'll be some sort of mandatory maintenance and system administration that you have to do every so often.

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

#105

> I'm going to assume everyone experiencing this issue is using M/S. Upgrading to HRD will solve your issue. This is the reason I abandoned AE and part of why adopting a platform that isn't standardized is incredibly dangerous. The problem is technical debt constantly accrues even when you aren't making changes . Even though the API was unchanged, HRD differs subtly enough that breakage can occur on any non-trivial p…

> The promise was a carefree life for a project willing to code against their proprietary APIs; the reality is a constantly moving target, "not quite free" autoscaling and the threat that while you're asleep an unannounced change will take down your app (I could name a few, but as many will attest this has happened regularly since launch). Yeah, I got sucked in with the same promise and I had the exact same sour expe…

[deleted]

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

#106
post #66
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…

He falls in to a trap of knowing machine behavior, but not dealing with people behavior.

Insanity #2: I need somebody to talk to when a service interruption occurs

You hear about an earthquake in California, you call your aunt to make sure she is ok.

You are getting bad weather in the area you live, your mom calls and checks on you.

The server you use disappears off the internet and your providers status page hasn't been updated for a week, you '...'?

When something goes wrong, it's not an event that effects everybody (even if it is), it's an event that effects you. As long as humans are still involved in the purchasing and managing of servers you'll always need someone to call and yell at/be soothed by.

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

#107

> I'm going to assume everyone experiencing this issue is using M/S. Upgrading to HRD will solve your issue. This is the reason I abandoned AE and part of why adopting a platform that isn't standardized is incredibly dangerous. The problem is technical debt constantly accrues even when you aren't making changes . Even though the API was unchanged, HRD differs subtly enough that breakage can occur on any non-trivial p…

Salesforce have quite a nice solution for a similar problem. If you write custom Apex code, the platform will not let you deploy it to live unless it has sufficient unit test coverage. It runs the tests and calculates code coverage when you try and deploy, and if your tests aren't covering enough, no deployment happens. So, you have tests. Then, upcoming platform changes are released to sandbox environments six month…

I take it they then don't have any tests of their own to assure backwards compatibility?

Maybe I've been spoiled by using Windows for 20 years but I feel that we should be able to expect better from vendors than this. That goes double if you're paying them, though it sounds in Salesforce's case as if they pay you, because I can't see any other way in which this arrangement would make sense.

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

#108

> I'm going to assume everyone experiencing this issue is using M/S. Upgrading to HRD will solve your issue. This is the reason I abandoned AE and part of why adopting a platform that isn't standardized is incredibly dangerous. The problem is technical debt constantly accrues even when you aren't making changes . Even though the API was unchanged, HRD differs subtly enough that breakage can occur on any non-trivial p…

If you've been running a 1997-era Perl app unmodified --including the operating system of the machine it's running on, and security patches to Perl in the mean time -- you are so owned and I really hope you're not storing any important data on that box. I'm not saying that App Engine is a panacea, but regardless of how you write your code and what technologies you use, there'll be some sort of mandatory maintenance a…

That's a fair point, however my personal expectation would be that unlike a perl (or PHP or Python or .. solution), App Engine probably won't exist in its current form as a supported product in 16 years.

Maybe it'll go the way of Wave, or perhaps hopefully the technology style itself will simply be supplanted by newer and better. Regardless I'd say that given an app today, the 1997 perl5 app (MySQL 3.2 and perl5.003 were already circulating) still has much better supportability prospects over this time frame than App Engine ever did or ever will.

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

#109
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Google has never appeared particularly concerned..." seems to be a recurring theme. The company was designed to work at large scale, and individual problems don't get the attention they would at more customer-oriented companies.

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

#110
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Because they did not post any kind of evidence (request logs, Pingdom report, etc.), not to mention the App ID in question (so that Google would know where to look). All too often, bug reports end up being some kind of misunderstanding.
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