News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Happy Holidays from the App Engine team - 1.4.0 SDK released by mmastrac on Thursday December 02, 2010 @03:19PM (#1963500)
This is great. We just turned on reserved instances for http://gri.pe (select "always on" in the billing section). It costs $9/month to keep three instances warm all the time. That's peanuts compared to saving the 10s warmup time if your traffic drops off for a minute.

Another huge item: up to 10 minutes of background processing on a single task queue callback:

  No more 30-second limit for background work - With this release, 
  we’ve significantly raised this limit for offline requests from 
  Task Queue and Cron: you can now run for up to 10 minutes without 
  interruption.
Make sure you turn on the new warmup handlers for your applications too. With this, AppEngine will deliver a request to /_ah/warmup and let it complete before serving traffic from a new instance.

XML:

  <inbound-services>
   <service>warmup</service>
  </inbound-services>
YAML:

  inbound_services:
   - warmup
Re:Happy Holidays from the App Engine team - 1.4.0 SDK released by ludwigvan on Thursday December 02, 2010 @05:02PM (#1963849)
Can someone explain this "always on" in more detail? I don't have much experience with Google App Engine, does this mean apps not used frequently have a startup time? So, if noone accessed the site in the last few minutes, the first user accessing has to wait some time for use?
Re:Happy Holidays from the App Engine team - 1.4.0 SDK released by URSpider94 on Thursday December 02, 2010 @05:31PM (#1963944)
Exactly right. Especially with larger apps, the "first" user often sees some latency while the app is loaded into memory, static data structures are re-created, etc. The always on feature should keep this from happening.
Re:Happy Holidays from the App Engine team - 1.4.0 SDK released by herrherr on Friday December 03, 2010 @03:47AM (#1965211)
Perhaps I'm being naive here, but doesn't an uptime-service like Pingdom do the job? They basically ping the site every 5 minutes which should keep the instance alive.
Re:Happy Holidays from the App Engine team - 1.4.0 SDK released by mark_l_watson on Thursday December 02, 2010 @04:33PM (#1963746)
Thanks for the price information - that is reasonable!