On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Barry Hunter <[email protected]> wrote: > On 19 May 2011 17:31, Stephen <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> No, the way it currently works is if your apps latency > 1000ms >> (figures of 800-900ms have also been mentioned) it won't scale. The >> lower the latency the more they scale it. So the incentive has always >> been to write low latency apps. > > For practical purposes yes - to be able to scale. > > But not from cost. If you where using your cpu over 10 instances, > costs roughly the same as using that cpu on two instances.
I think there's something that needs to be mentioned in discussions like this: High-latency requests don't scale *on appengine* because of specific design decisions made by Google. High-latency requests scale just fine on other platforms - the folks running Node.js/Tornado/EventMachine/etc have no problem whatsoever with tens of thousands of latent requests. Even traditional java appservers handle latency with acceptable limits - depending on what you're doing, you can get away with hundreds or even thousands of concurrent requests per JBoss instance. There is a terrific amount of price signaling going on in this change. It indicates that: * Memory is precious, CPU time is almost irrelevant. This is not too surprising; if you look at the rest of the cloud industry, almost all services are priced by the amount of RAM used and make no mention of how much CPU is allocated. Unfortunately all past price signaling has indicated to us just the opposite, and we have designed our applications around that. And unfortunately it turns out that GAE is *absurdly* inefficient about RAM usage. I have no doubt that Google will eventually address this issue - they will have to if they want to attract & retain customers - but in the mean time, it's going to hurt. Jeff -- 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=en.
