web service client on GAE production is too slow

[Joanne]

I have a Java web application that is hosted in google app engine.
There is a simple web service call to the Amazon Product and
Advertising API to look up for books when the user inputs a title.
Everything runs fine on my local development environment. However, the
web service call is annoyingly slow on production.

E.g. When I invoke the web service call in my dev environment, it
takes about 3-4 seconds to get the response back. In production, the
same call to the same API would take 15-16 seconds. There is no
datastore activity involved at this moment, just a web service call
and display the results.

I am pretty sure that this is not the initial load issues others are
talking about regarding GAE in production. It has been consistently
slow no matter if the load is warmed up. I have tried to search
everywhere but nobody seems to be complaining about the same issue.
Does anyone have any clue what this might be? Is there any good tool
to tackle this kind of performance issue? Thank you!

[Simon Knott]

The GAE Production servers all have a bank of IP addresses which tend to get rate limited to public APIs.  It's been mentioned many times in this group that if you want to access a public API and don't want to get rate limited, you need to host a lightweight proxy somewhere with a static IP address (e.g. Amazon EC2), and funnel all requests to the API through the proxy.

Cheers,

Simon

[pdknsk]

I haven't noticed this, quite the opposite. It's very fast. Throttling
isn't a problem either because Amazon uses custom quota for GAE. Even
if it was, Amazon doesn't stall the request but returns HTTP 503 in
such case.

You should check the RequestProcessingTime parameter in the response.
Maybe the problem is with Amazon and/or your requests.

[stevep]

pdknsk wrote:
Throttling isn't a problem either because Amazon uses custom quota
for GAE.

And yet Paypal complaints continue. Can't GAE + PP = Synergy?

[Jeff Schnitzer]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 2:42 PM, stevep <pros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> pdknsk wrote:
> Throttling  isn't a problem either because Amazon uses custom quota
> for GAE.
>
> And yet Paypal complaints continue. Can't GAE + PP = Synergy?

Unlike Amazon, Paypal lacks the technical aptitude to special-case
GAE. Either that or they just don't give a damn. I suspect both.

Jeff