Instances

[Jeff Huter]

Is there anyway to ensure that a second instance is never spun-up?  The traffic on my site is very minimal.  But, when I check the dashboard, more often than not there is a second instance running which has serviced just a request or two.  Given the usage on the site, there should be never a true need for a second instance.  In fact, I have no issue if requests timeout if by some strange course of events, the single instance is unable to keep up.

Jeff

[David Symonds]

There's some tuning knobs in the Application Settings section of the
admin console. You could try increasing the Min Pending Latency and
decreasing the Max Idle Instances.

[Kyle Finley]

There's also a feature request on the issue tracker for this:

Need Max-Instances control to limit max number of active instances

And, a relate issue that would allow a single instance the ability to handle more then 10 concurrent requests

[Jeff Huter]

On Monday, October 22, 2012 5:17:52 PM UTC-4, David Symonds wrote:

There's some tuning knobs in the Application Settings section of the
admin console. You could try increasing the Min Pending Latency and
decreasing the Max Idle Instances.

I've done that.  Doesn't seem to help.  I have:

Max Idle Instances set at "Automatic-1" which is the lowest setting.

Min Pendency  Latency set at "15-Automatic" which the the highest setting.

The scheduler still occasionally spins-up a second instance which then proceeds to go idle then eventually goes away.  The problem is that it's needlessly using resources that I end up paying for.  I enabled billing on Saturday and prior to tweaking these settings ended paying for additional instance hours.  It's unclear with it tweaked this way whether I'll need to pay for additional hours.  But, based on a causal monitoring it looks like it's going to be nearing the 28 hour limit most of the time.  There really should be away to say I want a single instance and no more.  It's a minor inconvenience at the moment because I'm unlikely to hit the monthly minimums in the near future so there is room at the moment for paying for additional but not needed instance hours.  However, that may not always be the case.

Jeff 

[Jeff Huter]

On Monday, October 22, 2012 5:25:53 PM UTC-4, Kyle Finley wrote:

There's also a feature request on the issue tracker for this:

Need Max-Instances control to limit max number of active instances

And, a relate issue that would allow a single instance the ability to handle more then 10 concurrent requests

Kyle,

Both of those links point to issue 5858.  I starred 5858.  If add a link to the other issue, I'll star that one as well.

Jeff

[Brandon Thomson]

The instances don't go away when Max Idle Instances is set at "Automatic-1", but you do stop getting charged for them, which should hopefully address your concern. You can verify this using the Instances chart (look at the "billed" line)

[Kyle Finley]

Sorry Jeff,

Here's the other issue:

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=7927

[Jeff Huter]

On Monday, October 22, 2012 5:37:08 PM UTC-4, Brandon Thomson wrote:

The instances don't go away when Max Idle Instances is set at "Automatic-1", but you do stop getting charged for them, which should hopefully address your concern. You can verify this using the Instances chart (look at the "billed" line)

Thanks Brandon.

Based on that chart, it looks like I should not have a problem from a billing standpoint.

Jeff 

[Brandon Thomson]

Actually, mine is set to "1-1". I'm not 100% sure "Automatic-1" works the same way.

But with "1-1" I rarely go over much over 24 instance hours/day even with a lot of traffic.

[Brandon Thomson]

I should add a note for anyone else who might be viewing this thread in the future:

This fix may not work if you have lots of long-running requests (like urlfetches to external services, for example) because the instance will become blocked at 10 simultaneous requests and then you will start having to pay for extras.

That's why the concurrent requests limit issue Kyle mentioned is important, and should be starred :)