Anastasios hit the nail square on the head. Idle instances are instance that are doing nothing. When a request comes in it will start a 4th. With your setup it will be more aggressive in shutting down the spare instances that's all. They are meant to have instances always ready to take requests. Depending on the language you are using it is more or less important to have these. Python is the fastest to boot, so you don't need as many, Java is the longest to boot so you need more idle. If Anastasios assumptions are correct and there are no end user interactions you can leave it at 0 and just take a slight hit when you send your first request.
It looks like you want to only ever have 3 instances. You should use Manual scaling with instances set to 3. If you have no need for instant response you can use basic with max_instances set to 3, this will scale down the number when they are not needed but cap at 3. @Anastasios be careful using daily budget to limit the number of instances. When you reach the cap it will stop all traffic request and not do any work until it resets. On Friday, October 23, 2015 at 1:41:00 AM UTC-4, Naresh Pokuri wrote: > > I have started my GAE app with *Auto-scaling* having *min-idle-instances > 3*, each with 1GB RAM and 2.4GHz processor(i.e *F4_1G*). And I have a > cron job which runs on every 5 minutes. With this setup keeping application > idle for one day should equal to 72 instance hours. But I see that it > already reached 428 instance hours. So, I am clueless here how GAE > calculates instance hours, with this alone I can keep my budget in control. > Can someone help me in this *instance hours* > -- 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 google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/27eb091a-b210-4d1c-86e2-1d38a143ac65%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
