maximum number of requests that may be handled in a single process lifetime

I was doing some load tests on app engine today when I noticed a new Info message in the logs: "After handling this request, the process that handled this request reached the maximum number of requests that may be handled in a single process' lifetime, and exited normally."

So what that supposed to mean ?
Up to know we new that application instances are automatically terminated after some inactivity time out. If I understand this message well now we know that a process can be terminated after handling so many requests. How many exactly ? is this a new magic number ? Lets hope we will have some definite answers from the always helpful App Engines team.

I am doing some latency optimization (lazy imports) in this app based on the assumption that an instance will stay live as long as there are more requests coming in and I was scared this new number spoils my optimization logic. After some more testing I have found out that this is not true since whatever this number is it must be in the order of thousands requests - so no big trouble in my use case. Still I think App Engine's developers deserve to know more about such parameters, it helps both developers and the platform.