Jeff: that does sound pretty awful. Is this issue limited to Python, or have 
you seen similar results with Java instances?

On Wednesday, July 11, 2012 8:10:14 PM UTC-4, Jeff Schnitzer wrote:
> I've been doing some load testing on Python27 frontends and backends
> and getting some fairly awful results.
> 
> My test is a simple no-op that returns a 4-letter constant string.  I
> hit frontend (F1) and backend (B1) versions with ab -c 100.
> 
> The frontend peaks at about 140 requests/sec per instance.  I've set
> the min latency to 15s to keep the # of instances to a minimum, which
> seems to work.  It never goes above 2 instances and one of them makes
> the 140 mark.  The admin instances page shows avg latency of 10-15ms.
> However, app logs show varying latency #s ranging from 30ms to 250ms.
> 
> The backend (single instance) peaks under 80 requests/sec.  The
> admin/instances page shows avg latency of 100ms.  App logs show
> latencies of 3000-4000ms.
> 
> Questions and observations:
> 
> 1) What does the avg latency # on admin/instances mean?  Presumably
> this is time spent executing my code and not time spent in the pending
> queue.  Except that no-ops don't take 100ms to execute.  What else is
> part of that number?
> 
> 2) Request time in the app logs includes time spent waiting in the
> pending queue, right?  It's the actual wall-clock time between when
> the request enters Google and leaves Google?
> 
> 3) Why are backends so abysmally slow?  If a backend is supposed to be
> *at all* useful for maintaining in-memory game state for more than
> five players, it needs to be able to process a high QPS rate.  That's
> fine, a couple synchronized operations on an in-memory data structure
> are lightning fast - a couple ms.  But where does this mysterious
> 100ms come from?  It destroys throughput.
> 
> 4) Try this exercise:  Deploy a frontend handler that does nothing but
> urlfetch to a backend no-op.  Run it.  It usually takes *hundreds* of
> milliseconds.  I've verified this with appstats.  Huh?  I can make
> urlfetches to Europe faster.
> 
> Jeff

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