I am working toward a proposal for elementary schools to use GAE for a
very, very light-weight process that monitors student's at home work.
We're talking 100 transactions per week. Thought for sure the schools
could set up a free app without any problem -- $9 a month is a hurdle
believe it or not for some schools.
Today I was playing around with a demo setup. I thought the free meant
max of one instance staying resident with the cost of netting out to
zero given G's gracious credit of 28 instance hours each day. What I
found though was every call (calls were a few minutes apart) made to
the app resulted in a new instance spinning up. (Should note that I
did have my app Dashboard open the full time viewing logs, instance
counts, etc.) Each time I checked the instances, there were zero.
Again, I thought one would stay resident.
This is a Python app (not 2.7), and is HR. Settings are full Auto on
the sliders. The handler is about 50 lines of code with imports only
for logging and urllib plus standard app engine library stuff. There
is one db.Model with one record in it which is only read using
get_by_key_name.
Free can still work for the app given the super-small load level. But
with instance spin up times ranging from 700ms to 66,000ms (have no
idea why), it can be a very choppy user experience.
--Coda--
OK, got to be smarter than this, so I enabled billing on the app. This
did result in one instance staying alive, but that *did not matter*.
Even though I was sending just one GET call every few minutes, every
call resulted in the Scheduler starting a new instance -- so I went
from one to two. Sure I understand that I am not getting billed for
the extra instance the Scheduler buffered up, but my call had to wait
for this instance to start up before getting serviced. So with about
one call every 3-5 minute, my average response time was around
6,000ms. Nuts!
I am meeting with a Principal on Tuesday. Again, I thought I had a
grasp on what Free meant, but today's work has left me with nothing
but questions and frustration. Any input would be appreciated.
stevep
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