I have gathered as much information as possible from the new pricing FAQ, the optimization document by Alon Levi and some posts on the blogesphere.
Here is what I know: * Frontend instances cost x2 compared to Backend * According to the post-preview pricing FAQ: - Do Frontend instances handle Task Queues and Cron? "Frontend instances handle Task Queue Requests by default." * According to Alon Levi's optimization tips article: - "The default settings for the Task Queue are tuned for performance." - "Use Backend in order to completely control the number of instances used for task execution" Currently my app uses a series of tasks for offline fetching & processing of data from 3rd party APIs (Twitter, Facebook). - A cron job creates several tasks for fetching data - each task perform a single urlfetch and storse the response json in a temp file. It then creates a different task that loads the json from the text file, processes it and creates & stores necessary data objects into the data store. I am not using Backends at the moment. I am trying to figure out which option will be cheaper - should switch to using Backends in order to completely control the number of instances or should I rely on app engine's scheduler & use the performance knobs? Does anyone have suggestion/tips/insight? -- 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/-/sW0JLfAsoW8J. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.