There is an issue going on for sometime now about App Engine's scaling capability.
We know that all App Engine's user facing HTTP Requests should be processed within a time-frame of 30 seconds, other wise will throw an exception. That is a rule that started with App Engine's introduction some two and half years ago, and until some time it was the only law applicable as far as I know. Then some months ago a new magic number has been introduced in group posts. It started as 1000ms within which an application has to respond other wise it could not scale properly (No new threads will be started to cope with increasing demand) later this number was lowered to 800ms.
I have raised this issue a month ago
here :
" This "800ms" rule started as 1000ms some time ago, now it moved to 800ms and 400ms enters the scene. I am afraid it has became a moving target approaching 0ms too fast. Somebody
must stop the bar somewhere."
But I got no reply.
In that thread even "sub-400ms" as optimal number is mentioned by a
Ikai L.
Today it turns out nobody stopped the bar, instead this magic number has decreased even further to
700ms which turns my above mentioned prophecy of approaching 0ms a step closer to true. I do agree with all people in this group who complain that this is troublesome and concerning. Main advantage of App Engine is
scalability, but this number kills scalability in most practical application scenarios.
It is understandable to raise the bar a little to reflect for advances in datastore latency but talking about 700 and sub 400 ms renders App Engine's scalability irrelevant for most if not all practical use cases.
There are other issues here that I am sure concern a lot of us poor App Engine's developers:
1) The always changing numbers.-I think it is reasonable to expect that an application put into production a year ago should have the same or better scalability behaviour today or a year from now. I know we operate on a Beta platform so we have to take some risk and follow up and improve our applications when Google changes the parameters under which we operate but we will never be able to catch up with this kind of drastic changes.
2) Transparency - We should be informed about those limits, so we know in advance if what we have in mind is doable with App Engine. I understand there can be some trade secrets for engineering and/or marketing reasons, but still we must be in the loop and at least know basic things that affect our Appls.
Having complained about this I want also to be fair to App Engine and its team. Up to know the usual practice is that most of those limits that affect our applications (quotas etc.) are improving over time not vice versa. This is an exception and I think it must be rectified.
