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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

#91
post #65

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.

I've paid over $50,000 a year for Google Maps. I assure you, their support sucks no matter how much you pay them. We pay a small fraction of that for AWS, and Amazon's support is infinitely better.

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

#94
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M/S is Master/Slave: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastor... HRD is High Replication Datastore: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/mi... M/S is deprecated, and HRD is the new hotness (and it conveniently costs more).

I think it cost the same, when it was first out it cost more, but now it cost the same.

For small applications it costs more because of thresholds for free services is lower. In our case it costs a lot more since some of things we were doing need another instance on HRD that we didn't need on M/S

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

#95

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.

There are tools that can migrate you from python 2 to python 3, or from Oracle to postgres. But it's not something you do lightly. Switching from M/S to HRD in AppEngine is similarly not something you do lightly.

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

#96

> 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 Master/Slave datastore has been deprecated for almost a year. [0] Beyond the latency issues, it simply wasn't reliable; both reads and writes were failing way too often. I'm glad GAE is focusing its resources on the HRD.

[0] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/masterslave-data...

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

#97

> 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 experience. Including panicky calls from the client when the app suddenly stopped working. The maintenance windows used to plop right in the middle of my client's busy time, once a month at least and often more.

The worst part is the apologists, like lysprr@gmail.com in the original bug report:

> I got here from HackerNews, but after seeing the original poster spam the forums in multiple places and have a bad attitude, I can't blame Google for not fixing what looks to me like a non-issue. > > Fuck 'em.

That always reply to your request for help while you're attempting to fix a suddenly dead application and a totally screwed client.

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

#98

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.

A comment from Google explaining the issue wouldn't be much to ask. "Move off of deprecated infrastructure" is much better than radio silence.

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

#99

> 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 months or so before they go live - you can see if your tests run, and have time to keep up with things. You do have to keep up though.

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

#100
It is interesting that basically no one (including the news poster) noticed that there is an comment (#12) which states that this problem happens on HRD too. This statement may be false and/or a completely different issue, but at least it should be considered here for HN comments which state "M/S is deprecated, Google is right, just use HRD."
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