[google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
Nothing a well timed CRON job can't help with. I do that with my requests, and keep the engine running warm, but it does come at a cost. On Sunday, February 3, 2013 10:25:12 AM UTC, gafal wrote: After months of complaining about user-facing loading requests, I'm burned. I'm quitting. I'm sad about it. I really enjoyed GAE beside this Critical issue (yes, this is critical to my customers, so its critical to me and should be critical to you). I don't think Google would accept to have it's search engine displaying results after 20 to 25 seconds to some customers because they reach a cold instance :-) Why would we? Why did you leave us in that situation? No solution or workaround has ever been provided. We just saw the GAE development team sticking to its position :-( Maybe because the scheduler is performing as designed? Customers are not satisfied so please, redesign it. There 's a lot of work awaiting me to get out of GAE framework since I've been using a lot of the provided services. I'm really angry about that. That's a lesson hardly learned: avoid provider locking* even with Google*. It was too good to be true. Gael -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
[google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
Just to clarify. I've tested all the suggestions offered in the forums. I'm paying around 100 $ per month to GAE. I've warmup requests activated, I've idle instances, I've played with the min and max Pending Latency settings I've cron job every minute I did not want to quit (I really enjoyed GAE besides this CRITICAL issue) and I'm unhappy to do it when I think about all the work I have to do to free my application from GAE framework. :-( Le lundi 4 février 2013 18:31:55 UTC+1, Guy Armitage a écrit : Nothing a well timed CRON job can't help with. I do that with my requests, and keep the engine running warm, but it does come at a cost. On Sunday, February 3, 2013 10:25:12 AM UTC, gafal wrote: After months of complaining about user-facing loading requests, I'm burned. I'm quitting. I'm sad about it. I really enjoyed GAE beside this Critical issue (yes, this is critical to my customers, so its critical to me and should be critical to you). I don't think Google would accept to have it's search engine displaying results after 20 to 25 seconds to some customers because they reach a cold instance :-) Why would we? Why did you leave us in that situation? No solution or workaround has ever been provided. We just saw the GAE development team sticking to its position :-( Maybe because the scheduler is performing as designed? Customers are not satisfied so please, redesign it. There 's a lot of work awaiting me to get out of GAE framework since I've been using a lot of the provided services. I'm really angry about that. That's a lesson hardly learned: avoid provider locking* even with Google*. It was too good to be true. Gael -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
[google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
And of course Multithread activated. Even with min pending latency of 14.9s, some users hit cold instances and get 20 to 40 s latency depending on GAE performances... Le lundi 4 février 2013 18:56:40 UTC+1, gafal a écrit : Just to clarify. I've tested all the suggestions offered in the forums. I'm paying around 100 $ per month to GAE. I've warmup requests activated, I've idle instances, I've played with the min and max Pending Latency settings I've cron job every minute I did not want to quit (I really enjoyed GAE besides this CRITICAL issue) and I'm unhappy to do it when I think about all the work I have to do to free my application from GAE framework. :-( -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
[google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
Hi gafal I totally understand your frustration - I've done some development on App Engine when it started and I still run some of the application there. I was moaning about the cold starts issue in couple of threads but I kind of sure that if there would be a simple solution the GAE team would probably fix that (I'm little bit worried that if they would do the proposed magic button never start a new instance for user facing request they will probably face some other (for-us external devs unforeseen) issues or maybe it just a step against the whole philosophy of the GAE platform - but who knows). However, in last month I've noticed very poor performance of my App (which was running on M/S datastore all the time - I was getting a lot of cold stars, exceptions from datastore/memcache/tasks) so I've decided to redeploy to HR (my data are not important so I didn't need to think about db migration and so). And I'm again pretty happy with the performance - I didn't change line of the code, I'm using the minimal paid version and I keep all the instances on automatic (no resident instance) - I can see that the GAE runs two dynamic instances and keeps them alive for tenth of thousands request and very occasionally starts a new instance - well last time when Google bot visited me (I have a 100k pages in google index now) it was quite interesting to watch how the GAE dealt with the traffic, it just scaled so beautifully. I had to say that my app uses pure servlets + jdo so the cold startup time is ~5-6 seconds - which is even acceptably for occasional user facing requests. I've tried to migrate the app to Spring MVC (+velocity+ehcache+rest+bunch of other libraries) and as far as I can tell this scenario is not suitable for the GAE atm - cold starts above 45secs are too long and the GAE tries to spin up new instances very often. So the conclusion for myself and maybe something for further discussion with other gae devs is (and now I'm talking about java apps only): 1) forget about using Spring MVC and other Spring based frameworks (if you don't want to spend money on multiple resident instances) - you can of course try to fire up 1 min cron job to keep dynamic instances app but from my experience the scheduler starts some new instance even if there are a dynamic instances available 2) use pure servlet + jsp's (seems like gae is pretty going to be more and more optimized for jsp's - all the precompilation and jar packaging which happens on deploy and so on) 3) make your app from smaller independent applications - at the moment I'm splitting the app logic into smaller components each running as a separate app (so I have a component for displaying images/book covers, another component for getting book information, another component for getting book prices and so on) - I'm going to use these component apps as REST/JSON based backends and call them from the main app (which basically just puts all data together) through async requests 4) be prepared to handle all possible exceptions - anything can happen with GAE (datastore, memcache/task and so so) - catch everything and handle properly (try to set some timeouts as well) or if your request will timeout on stuff like this gae will keep spinning new and new instances 5) caching everything - for db use objectify (which caches almost automatically) If you REALLY REALLY would like to use the Spring MVC (or similar DI framework) consider to move the frontend app somewhere else - I've put a beta version on Appfog (and experimenting with Openshift as well which got me on Tomcat7 support + absolutely awesome war deploy through GIT and ssh console!) and I test it atm (but I'm still going to keep all the API backends on GAE probably) - my MVC app is just presentation logic talking through REST template to GAE and some other API's (it doesn't have any database) Just my 2 cents. Cheers Tomas On Tuesday, 5 February 2013 07:03:48 UTC+13, gafal wrote: And of course Multithread activated. Even with min pending latency of 14.9s, some users hit cold instances and get 20 to 40 s latency depending on GAE performances... Le lundi 4 février 2013 18:56:40 UTC+1, gafal a écrit : Just to clarify. I've tested all the suggestions offered in the forums. I'm paying around 100 $ per month to GAE. I've warmup requests activated, I've idle instances, I've played with the min and max Pending Latency settings I've cron job every minute I did not want to quit (I really enjoyed GAE besides this CRITICAL issue) and I'm unhappy to do it when I think about all the work I have to do to free my application from GAE framework. :-( -- 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.
[google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
Hi Tomas, thanks a lot for your suggestions. I'm indeed, using Spring framework. Your suggestions require a lot of work and I'd rather make my application GAE framework free and get the possibility to change Paas provider if I'm not satisfied by their service instead of locking me further with GAE. Sure I like the framework but I'm not completely crazy blind about it ;-) Le lundi 4 février 2013 19:19:38 UTC+1, Tomas a écrit : Hi gafal I totally understand your frustration - I've done some development on App Engine when it started and I still run some of the application there. I was moaning about the cold starts issue in couple of threads but I kind of sure that if there would be a simple solution the GAE team would probably fix that (I'm little bit worried that if they would do the proposed magic button never start a new instance for user facing request they will probably face some other (for-us external devs unforeseen) issues or maybe it just a step against the whole philosophy of the GAE platform - but who knows). However, in last month I've noticed very poor performance of my App (which was running on M/S datastore all the time - I was getting a lot of cold stars, exceptions from datastore/memcache/tasks) so I've decided to redeploy to HR (my data are not important so I didn't need to think about db migration and so). And I'm again pretty happy with the performance - I didn't change line of the code, I'm using the minimal paid version and I keep all the instances on automatic (no resident instance) - I can see that the GAE runs two dynamic instances and keeps them alive for tenth of thousands request and very occasionally starts a new instance - well last time when Google bot visited me (I have a 100k pages in google index now) it was quite interesting to watch how the GAE dealt with the traffic, it just scaled so beautifully. I had to say that my app uses pure servlets + jdo so the cold startup time is ~5-6 seconds - which is even acceptably for occasional user facing requests. I've tried to migrate the app to Spring MVC (+velocity+ehcache+rest+bunch of other libraries) and as far as I can tell this scenario is not suitable for the GAE atm - cold starts above 45secs are too long and the GAE tries to spin up new instances very often. So the conclusion for myself and maybe something for further discussion with other gae devs is (and now I'm talking about java apps only): 1) forget about using Spring MVC and other Spring based frameworks (if you don't want to spend money on multiple resident instances) - you can of course try to fire up 1 min cron job to keep dynamic instances app but from my experience the scheduler starts some new instance even if there are a dynamic instances available 2) use pure servlet + jsp's (seems like gae is pretty going to be more and more optimized for jsp's - all the precompilation and jar packaging which happens on deploy and so on) 3) make your app from smaller independent applications - at the moment I'm splitting the app logic into smaller components each running as a separate app (so I have a component for displaying images/book covers, another component for getting book information, another component for getting book prices and so on) - I'm going to use these component apps as REST/JSON based backends and call them from the main app (which basically just puts all data together) through async requests 4) be prepared to handle all possible exceptions - anything can happen with GAE (datastore, memcache/task and so so) - catch everything and handle properly (try to set some timeouts as well) or if your request will timeout on stuff like this gae will keep spinning new and new instances 5) caching everything - for db use objectify (which caches almost automatically) If you REALLY REALLY would like to use the Spring MVC (or similar DI framework) consider to move the frontend app somewhere else - I've put a beta version on Appfog (and experimenting with Openshift as well which got me on Tomcat7 support + absolutely awesome war deploy through GIT and ssh console!) and I test it atm (but I'm still going to keep all the API backends on GAE probably) - my MVC app is just presentation logic talking through REST template to GAE and some other API's (it doesn't have any database) Just my 2 cents. Cheers Tomas On Tuesday, 5 February 2013 07:03:48 UTC+13, gafal wrote: And of course Multithread activated. Even with min pending latency of 14.9s, some users hit cold instances and get 20 to 40 s latency depending on GAE performances... Le lundi 4 février 2013 18:56:40 UTC+1, gafal a écrit : Just to clarify. I've tested all the suggestions offered in the forums. I'm paying around 100 $ per month to GAE. I've warmup requests activated, I've idle instances, I've played with the min and max Pending Latency settings I've cron job every minute I did
[google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
Besides the cold startup problem, I can't recall reading about any GAE success stories where java was the language of choice. Probably most java frameworks are too big and too slow to start for what GAE is trying to do. What I'm saying is that even if Python is slower as a language, the most crucial factors for a web app performances on GAE are cold startup time (that is lower in python) and access to the datastore (that is the same), not the language speed itself. There have been endless threads on ways to split a java app in order to minimize the cold startup time. Basically one has to keep the frontend as small as possible, and that means not using the frameworks one would normally use (I know a lot of people don't like that). On Tuesday, 5 February 2013 07:36:17 UTC+13, gafal wrote: Hi Tomas, thanks a lot for your suggestions. I'm indeed, using Spring framework. Your suggestions require a lot of work and I'd rather make my application GAE framework free and get the possibility to change Paas provider if I'm not satisfied by their service instead of locking me further with GAE. Sure I like the framework but I'm not completely crazy blind about it ;-) Le lundi 4 février 2013 19:19:38 UTC+1, Tomas a écrit : Hi gafal I totally understand your frustration - I've done some development on App Engine when it started and I still run some of the application there. I was moaning about the cold starts issue in couple of threads but I kind of sure that if there would be a simple solution the GAE team would probably fix that (I'm little bit worried that if they would do the proposed magic button never start a new instance for user facing request they will probably face some other (for-us external devs unforeseen) issues or maybe it just a step against the whole philosophy of the GAE platform - but who knows). However, in last month I've noticed very poor performance of my App (which was running on M/S datastore all the time - I was getting a lot of cold stars, exceptions from datastore/memcache/tasks) so I've decided to redeploy to HR (my data are not important so I didn't need to think about db migration and so). And I'm again pretty happy with the performance - I didn't change line of the code, I'm using the minimal paid version and I keep all the instances on automatic (no resident instance) - I can see that the GAE runs two dynamic instances and keeps them alive for tenth of thousands request and very occasionally starts a new instance - well last time when Google bot visited me (I have a 100k pages in google index now) it was quite interesting to watch how the GAE dealt with the traffic, it just scaled so beautifully. I had to say that my app uses pure servlets + jdo so the cold startup time is ~5-6 seconds - which is even acceptably for occasional user facing requests. I've tried to migrate the app to Spring MVC (+velocity+ehcache+rest+bunch of other libraries) and as far as I can tell this scenario is not suitable for the GAE atm - cold starts above 45secs are too long and the GAE tries to spin up new instances very often. So the conclusion for myself and maybe something for further discussion with other gae devs is (and now I'm talking about java apps only): 1) forget about using Spring MVC and other Spring based frameworks (if you don't want to spend money on multiple resident instances) - you can of course try to fire up 1 min cron job to keep dynamic instances app but from my experience the scheduler starts some new instance even if there are a dynamic instances available 2) use pure servlet + jsp's (seems like gae is pretty going to be more and more optimized for jsp's - all the precompilation and jar packaging which happens on deploy and so on) 3) make your app from smaller independent applications - at the moment I'm splitting the app logic into smaller components each running as a separate app (so I have a component for displaying images/book covers, another component for getting book information, another component for getting book prices and so on) - I'm going to use these component apps as REST/JSON based backends and call them from the main app (which basically just puts all data together) through async requests 4) be prepared to handle all possible exceptions - anything can happen with GAE (datastore, memcache/task and so so) - catch everything and handle properly (try to set some timeouts as well) or if your request will timeout on stuff like this gae will keep spinning new and new instances 5) caching everything - for db use objectify (which caches almost automatically) If you REALLY REALLY would like to use the Spring MVC (or similar DI framework) consider to move the frontend app somewhere else - I've put a beta version on Appfog (and experimenting with Openshift as well which got me on Tomcat7 support + absolutely awesome war deploy through GIT and ssh console!)
[google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
I'm unhappy too after reading your experience There is a 0.01% background process on my mind considering how hard would it be to migrate from gae, and its indeed VERY hard, I'm also using infinitely many gae-stuff and mini-quirks I think Google lost developer-trust by locking and hustling developers with the Google Maps pricing, so I would expect anything However, I really like GAE, and the team behind it, from my side of view its beautiful, I have a 1.5 year old app, and it has been working like a clock ( a clock that requires adjustment every now and then : ) Was your app low traffic? In my opinion there is no point in using GAE for a non-extreme traffic app (or the possibility of extreme traffic, that's the dream), because you restrict yourself in extreme ways rather than using mysql and stuff, and chill. I didn't get the problem you have described, maybe because I didn't see it before (but maybe my users too are seeing it but I just don't know about it ), but I agree that they need to provide an option for custom error pages etc. (maybe they already do, I haven't seen them yet) Every now and then, a GAE-wide error fury comes and all users face google error pages, not pretty On Sunday, February 3, 2013 12:25:12 PM UTC+2, gafal wrote: After months of complaining about user-facing loading requests, I'm burned. I'm quitting. I'm sad about it. I really enjoyed GAE beside this Critical issue (yes, this is critical to my customers, so its critical to me and should be critical to you). I don't think Google would accept to have it's search engine displaying results after 20 to 25 seconds to some customers because they reach a cold instance :-) Why would we? Why did you leave us in that situation? No solution or workaround has ever been provided. We just saw the GAE development team sticking to its position :-( Maybe because the scheduler is performing as designed? Customers are not satisfied so please, redesign it. There 's a lot of work awaiting me to get out of GAE framework since I've been using a lot of the provided services. I'm really angry about that. That's a lesson hardly learned: avoid provider locking* even with Google*. It was too good to be true. Gael -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: [google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Kaan Soral kaanso...@gmail.com wrote: Was your app low traffic? In my opinion there is no point in using GAE for a non-extreme traffic app (or the possibility of extreme traffic, that's the dream), because you restrict yourself in extreme ways rather than using mysql and stuff, and chill. High-traffic apps rarely start that way. If apps are stillborn because performance sucks during the early-adopter and growth stage, then GAE is really only useful for Google and we're pretty much all wasting our time. Also: I have yet to see any hard evidence that high-traffic apps do not suffer the same cold start problem as low-traffic apps. It could easily be that the number of cold start requests are simply lost in the volume of successful requests. After all, users don't report hung http requests; they just reload the page and assume it was their ISP's fault. Gafal: Sorry to see you go, but I totally understand. This issue is deeply frustrating for me too. Jeff -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: [google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
Jeff's point is exactly right: many start-ups and developers subject themselves to the lock-in and quirks of GAE because they hope to eventually become wildly successful, and they recognize the incredibly hard challenge of managing a rapidly scaling infrastructure with limited resources. However, the cold-start issue adds an unwelcome and unnecessary obstacle to success, by subjecting a significant percentage of users to unacceptably high latencies. There are more than enough obstacles to success already, as most entrepreneurs are acutely aware, and so for those experiencing this it is extremely frustrating, bordering on maddening. One post by a GAE Product Manager or engineer saying the following would go a really long way with most of us: We hear you.We recognize this as a significant problem. We are on it. On Sunday, February 3, 2013 5:30:21 PM UTC-8, Jeff Schnitzer wrote: On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Kaan Soral kaan...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Was your app low traffic? In my opinion there is no point in using GAE for a non-extreme traffic app (or the possibility of extreme traffic, that's the dream), because you restrict yourself in extreme ways rather than using mysql and stuff, and chill. High-traffic apps rarely start that way. If apps are stillborn because performance sucks during the early-adopter and growth stage, then GAE is really only useful for Google and we're pretty much all wasting our time. Also: I have yet to see any hard evidence that high-traffic apps do not suffer the same cold start problem as low-traffic apps. It could easily be that the number of cold start requests are simply lost in the volume of successful requests. After all, users don't report hung http requests; they just reload the page and assume it was their ISP's fault. Gafal: Sorry to see you go, but I totally understand. This issue is deeply frustrating for me too. Jeff -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: [google-appengine] Re: giving up with GAE
Many moons ago, someone made the very common-sensical suggestion that developers be given a check-box that would tell The Scheduler to never serve a request from a cold instance. That was, as I noted, many moons ago in a thread essentially the same as this. Since then, the subject of this thread has been oft repeated. Not contributing anything I know. Hoping as a SMB user that these threads eventually end. -stevep On Sunday, February 3, 2013 6:38:22 PM UTC-8, Michael Hermus wrote: Jeff's point is exactly right: many start-ups and developers subject themselves to the lock-in and quirks of GAE because they hope to eventually become wildly successful, and they recognize the incredibly hard challenge of managing a rapidly scaling infrastructure with limited resources. However, the cold-start issue adds an unwelcome and unnecessary obstacle to success, by subjecting a significant percentage of users to unacceptably high latencies. There are more than enough obstacles to success already, as most entrepreneurs are acutely aware, and so for those experiencing this it is extremely frustrating, bordering on maddening. One post by a GAE Product Manager or engineer saying the following would go a really long way with most of us: We hear you.We recognize this as a significant problem. We are on it. On Sunday, February 3, 2013 5:30:21 PM UTC-8, Jeff Schnitzer wrote: On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Kaan Soral kaan...@gmail.com wrote: Was your app low traffic? In my opinion there is no point in using GAE for a non-extreme traffic app (or the possibility of extreme traffic, that's the dream), because you restrict yourself in extreme ways rather than using mysql and stuff, and chill. High-traffic apps rarely start that way. If apps are stillborn because performance sucks during the early-adopter and growth stage, then GAE is really only useful for Google and we're pretty much all wasting our time. Also: I have yet to see any hard evidence that high-traffic apps do not suffer the same cold start problem as low-traffic apps. It could easily be that the number of cold start requests are simply lost in the volume of successful requests. After all, users don't report hung http requests; they just reload the page and assume it was their ISP's fault. Gafal: Sorry to see you go, but I totally understand. This issue is deeply frustrating for me too. Jeff -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
