Thanks Josh, I actually did have a cron job running in App Engine
itself.  I tried running an external job because I wasn't sure whether
or not external and internal requests are routed differently.

Are you running a custom app framework like Django or are you mostly
sticking to stuff built into App Engine?

I may have to consider going with Django 0.96 which apparently is
built into AppEngine, but I'm not really looking forward to such a
migration.

Cheers,
Percy

On Sep 21, 11:04 am, Joshua Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
> How about creating a cron job in the application itself and pinging  
> more frequently?
>
> I have a statistics-collection cron in one of my apps that runs once a  
> minute.  So I suppose I'm doing exactly what you describe, and I  
> certainly do not see much of any variation in response times.
>
> Of course, I can see why google would find this kind of thing pretty  
> annoying, since it could undermine their ability to use their hardware  
> efficiently!
>
> -Joshua
>
> On Sep 21, 2009, at 11:51 AM, pdub wrote:
>
>
>
> > I have a Python-based application deployed on the App Engine.  The
> > application framework (Django App Engine Patch) is a little bit
> > heavyweight, so it takes some time to start up and load all the
> > necessary modules, but once it's loaded it's quite fast.  From my
> > logs, it looks like the application is having to start up fairly
> > frequently, which causes very inconsistent response times depending on
> > whether or not it's loading again.  To my knowledge, this can be due
> > to two reasons:
>
> > 1. The request is being handled by a new processing node on which the
> > application hasn't been loaded yet
> > 2. The application had been loaded on this node, but it has been so
> > long since the last request that it has been unloaded in the meantime
>
> > To try to resolve point 2, I created a cron job on an external server
> > that "pings" the home page of my app every 10 seconds or so, and this
> > has helped somewhat.  However, my logs show that the application still
> > has to start up on about half of these ping requests.
>
> > To improve my process for keeping my application warm, it would help
> > if I understood:
>
> > A. How are requests routed in appengine (round-robin, some stickiness,
> > etc.)?
> > B. How long can I typically expect my application to stay loaded in
> > memory?
>
> > This would help me figure out whether my approach is even viable (i.e.
> > won't work for round-robin over large cluster) and what to set my ping
> > interval at.
>
> > Does anyone have any documentation/insights into either of these
> > points and/or suggestions for alternate approaches to achieving more
> > consistent response times?
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