Hello Patrick, As can be seen on the high-level feature comparison chart <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-environments#comparing_high-level_features>, App Engine Flexible is indeed supposed to be slower than Standard. That is because you are booting up an entire VM as opposed to a simple container.
You can certainly keep a number of instances up and ready to take requests using cron jobs but there will always come a time where your application needs to scale up due to receiving too much new traffic and where cold starts will occur. The scheduler attempts to reduce the incidences of cold starts by scaling up the number of instances quickly to handle traffic spikes. And yes, in the end a Go application would perform faster than a Java application. On Thursday, October 12, 2017 at 8:31:47 AM UTC-4, Patrick Jackson wrote: > > Hi Folks, > > In regards to autoscaling with the flex environment, what sort of spin up > time can be expected? In other words, once the scheduler decides to create > new instances, how long before that instance is ready for traffic? I am > working with Java 8 with a small - medium sized application, but insights > from other runtimes are welcome. > > We've tried GAE Standard with Java 8, however have been completely > dissatisfied with the autoscaling in the Java environment. Start up on new > instances take 9+ seconds, and there does not appear to be a way to keep > user facing requests from hitting a cold start. I've tested with resident > instances and cron jobs for "always on", but just does not appear to be > possible. Plenty of other antedotes in this group to assure me that > preventing a user facing request from hitting a cold start (or heavy > latency due to startup not complete) is simply not possible on GAE > Standard. If I'd know this up front, I would have choosen Go, or python. > If Google would be more up front about this situation it would help many > devs and the GAE as a whole. > > So investigation is now if the flex environment can serve traffic without > a user facing high latency due to an instance starting up. Also curious in > the time it takes to start instances. One speaker at Cloud Next said a > couple of minutes, which is much higher than GAE standard. > > Patrick Jackson > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/4a6b0395-8942-4b65-85f9-36ba92fac4b0%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
