Cached requests and increased bandwidth usage and bill.

[sgabello]

Hello everyone!

Since July 1st I noticed a huge increment in the outgoing bandwidth
used by my App. I was using around 0.3 GB/day and it's now rocketed to
a whopping 2 GB/day. This is not due to an increase in users or a new
version of my App. Everything is steady and nothing changed on my
side.

I've been in touch with Google App engine team and they told me that
this is due to a change to the way the requests are counted because
they now take into account "cached" requests. However I can't really
understand what these "cached" requests are. They said that are those
generated by the domain associated with the app. But that has always
been the case: all my requests have been always generated by that
domain before... so... if they were not counted correctly, I shouldn't
have had any bandwidth usage recorded in the past.

Of course, the change has led to a an increase in my bill. But that's
another story...

BTW... is this happening to someone else? Have you registered an
increase in your bandwidth/request numbers since July 1st?
Can someone explain to me what really are cached requests?

Here's the ticket that I opened with the support team:
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5357

Cheers,
Andrea

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for giving me a chance to explain this.

Previously we were not accounting of all the "cached" requests coming
to applications through www.customdomain.com, meaning that the admin
console was missing some portion of the cached requests (cache hits),
and was mostly only billing non-cached request (cache misses).

That caused applications serving from appid.appspot.com to be billed
more than application serving from www.customdomain.com:
- serving cached requests from www.customdomain.com was basically free
(not billed)
- serving cached requests from appid.appspot.com was billed.

We recently fixed this, and now the admin console (and the bill)
should reflect all the cached requests coming to applications
regardless of if they are coming from www.customdomain.com or
appid.appspot.com.

Hope this explanation make things clearer.

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--
Johan Euphrosine (proppy)
Developer Programs Engineer
Google Developer Relations

[Ronoaldo José de Lana Pereira]

Thanks for explaining this Johan. There is another thread on this cached requests previously, and I was about to post something right now.

Can you explain more about those "cached requests" please? Are they requests that uses Memcache or requests that return a 304 NOT MODIFIED response (like the static handlers with cache configuration)?

--

Ronoaldo

[Johan Euphrosine]

Hi Ronoaldo,

Yep, cached request as in HTTP Cached request:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html

Hope this is more clear now.

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