On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Locke <[email protected]> wrote: > > Really? Are you absolutely certain that it is technically impossible > to spin up an app *before* handing it over to users? Are you confident > that the laws of physics prohibit spinning up new instance of apps in > the background after deployment?
Anything is technically possible. That doesn't mean it's going to happen. Everything in the /apparent/ design of Appengine happens in the context of a user request - logging, billing, quotas - everything. While I'd love to see a really smart version of appengine spin up new instances while the old ones continue to serve, I wouldn't hold my breath. This feature doesn't even exist in any of the J2EE systems I can download: JBoss, Resin, Glassfish, Geronimo, not even Jetty or Tomcat standalone. The last time I used WebLogic or WebSphere, neither could do it. I'd bet they still can't. It's a tricky problem, and I'm making a semi-educated guess that this feature would require changing a lot of engineering assumptions inside GAE. I'd rather have spatial indexes. > Though I've never developed an appserver myself, I suspect your > assertion about the infeasibility of this particular problem is > incorrect. I don't know how big the appengine team is, but it > certainly would be reasonable for Google to devote a few more > resources to the project, considering its popularity and the constant > stream of users asking for a specific feature. I'm not sure if > Robert's method of complaining loudly all over the internet would > cause Google management to react or not, though. I've spent enough time debugging other people's appservers to have an appreciation for the problem. I'm also going to go out on a limb here and speculate that GAE is a money-losing operation. It's one of dozens of popular and promising projects that all could use "a few more resources". > I just reworked my apps so that they run on multiple different > platforms, and I'm watching appengine closely in hopes that I can move > back to it once the bugs are worked out. You can get a VPS from the > likes of RackSpace for $11/month. Such a solution requires a little > more sysadmin work, but that's preferable to giving users random 500s > due to "excessive latency" and whatnot. Let's be realistic - if your project will run happily on an $11/mo VM, you're probably not even cracking the free limits on GAE. How much do you expect Google to care? If you were paying $10k/mo in hosting fees and having problems with GAE, I'll bet someone would take notice. Jeff -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine for Java" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-java?hl=en.
