This is a real problem for GAE. Low traffic sites are getting cycled out very aggressively, sometimes in 1-3 seconds. This creates an unacceptable user experience for low traffic sites, because almost every user sees a 3-10 second delay, and if they take a couple of seconds to read the page, they see the delay for every page. GAE is great in theory, but in practice this one aspect is horrible.
What to do: - As you describe, poll your app every 2 seconds - Google is considering allowing you to pay to keep your app warm - Switch to something else, like LAMP or EC2 If everyone polls their app, Google gets more aggressive about cycling out apps; see the Tragedy of the Commons: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/22692895421825cb/ I don't know what the answer is, but as my company gets closer to mainstream launch, this is very worrisome: how will we ever attract a user base big enough to keep our app warm if the initial users all experience a horribly slow site? Note that as I write this on Saturday, things actually seem pretty good. Our app isn't getting cycled out every couple of seconds, and startup time is <3 seconds. But this past week we would disappear every 2 seconds, and startup time was frequently 6-10 seconds. I hope Google has done something, but I fear it's just light weekend load. On Nov 13, 1:59 pm, JohnJ <[email protected]> wrote: > It seems that since my site receives a low number of requests the site > can go to sleep (GAE reclaims the resources). As a consequence if > you're the unlucky person who makes the next request you have to wait > a LONG time to get a response. > > How do folks deal with this? > > A couple ideas come to mind 1) create a task that runs every so often > to keep my app alive 2) enable an external monitor to ping/heartbeat > my app every so often. Both ideas seem to artificially eat up my > quote so i'm not too exited about these solutions. Also what is the > proper amount of time to fire one of these tasks/heartbeats? After > how much in-activity does GAE reclaim the JVM? > > Thanks for the help up front > > JohnJ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" 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?hl=.
