On Wednesday, June 13, 2012 10:51:25 PM UTC+2, Simon Knott wrote: > > That doesn't add a hard limit to the maximum number of instances that GAE > can spin up, it's just a hint to the scheduler that it shouldn't spin up a > new instance unless the current incoming request will have to wait longer > than 10s to process with existing instances. If GAE is playing up, it's > very likely that an incoming request *will *have to wait this long and > boom, you've got runaway instances being spun up.
Every App Engine service has an RPC client with a number of settings, including deadline/timeout. Plus, I can't imagine what would run (successfully) longer than 10s, hardly even 5s, unless it's a backend or something and that's a different story. > > At the moment you have no way to limit the instances - if the scheduler > went completely awry, they could keep spinning up instances until the cows > come home and you have no way to stop it. > That sounded like end of the world. In that case I might as well go and shoot myself. There are a number of ways to control your billing: better coding, deadline/timeout settings, latency sliders, idle instances, reserved instance hours, backends, etc. It's just not expressed in "number of instances" parameter, that's it. > > On Wednesday, 13 June 2012 21:20:16 UTC+1, alex wrote: >> >> Simon, so you're saying that setting Min Pending Latency slider to e.g. >> 10s does not work for you? >> >> >> On Wednesday, June 13, 2012 10:09:20 PM UTC+2, Simon Knott wrote: >>> >>> I still find it bizarre that we can't cap the maximum number of >>> instances. >>> >>> If we could say "I never want any more than 5 instances", then this >>> billing problem goes away - sure, your service will probably be hit with >>> performance issues, but at least you are in more control of your outgoing >>> costs. >>> >>> On Wednesday, 13 June 2012 09:20:23 UTC+1, nischalshetty wrote: >>>> >>>> We have been on GAE/J from more than 2 years now. We have 2 products >>>> that run on it. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed an unusually high latency >>>> for one of our products and as a result a high number of instances being >>>> present (I guess if latency increases, the number of instances would >>>> increase as well to serve new requests). >>>> >>>> I logged a production issue >>>> (link<http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=7624>) >>>> and the gae team took it up swiftly and started work on fixing it. Though >>>> it took time to fix it, I was happy that they were in touch while fixing >>>> the issue. >>>> >>>> Since the bump in instances was a result of the problem encountered due >>>> to a degradation of GAE infrastructure, I thought it was right on my part >>>> to ask for a refund of the extra billing charges that were levied. >>>> >>>> Our charges are usually in the range of $30 per day but during the 3 >>>> days the charges were *$86, $188 and $47* (attached the screenshot). >>>> That's pretty steep and it does hurt our weekly budgets as we're a >>>> bootstrapped startup. >>>> >>>> When I contacted customer service and asked for a refund I was told >>>> that the SLA is violated when there are exceptions thrown with error code >>>> 500. Since that wasn't really the case here, we were denied the refund. >>>> >>>> In our case it was the latency(caused due to some problem with >>>> appengine) that made our app take a big hit which means it isn't covered >>>> under SLA! In case the GAE infrastructure degrades again, and instances >>>> spin up at a crazy rate once more, it means we have to pay the charges. I >>>> dread if this problem ever crops up again and stays for a week. >>>> >>>> This can happen to anyone due to any bug in appengine and I thought it >>>> was good to give a heads up. If GAE causes a high number of instances to >>>> spin up for no fault of yours, you would still end up paying the charges. >>>> >>> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/-/Gqhyx-0UL7UJ. 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.
