Google app engine intermittent ping failure for custom URL

[Ruckmani Sivasubramanian Aravindan]

Background

We have a google app engine app serving a custom domain (https). The setup has been working for over 2 years now (initially it was http and we shifted to https around 6 months ago). Past one month we are facing intermittent issues of pages timing out/long delays (over 20-30 seconds to load instead of usual 1-2 seconds). When we access our app directly via the appspot url, it works consistently.

Debugging the issue we realized the following:

When I ping our appspot link (https://appid.appspot.com), the IP address is 74.125.130.141 and it ping consistently

• When I ping our custom URL (https://www.appdomain.com), the IP address is 74.125.200.121and ping fails intermittently
• When ever the IP address is pingable, our app works fine. When ever the app is timing out, the ping also fails.
• The failing IP address seems to be one of the IPs in google IP address range - see output of https://ipdb.at/ip/74.125.200.121
• The CNAME record for my domain for the host "www" points to ghs.googlehosted.com

Questions

• Has anything changed within google app engine IP mapping in the recent months?
• Is there a way I can force my custom domain to reach a "stable" IP address within the google app engine farm?

[Ruckmani Sivasubramanian Aravindan]

We have a blog subdomain which is served by blogspot.com. To enable this, the CNAME is configured to "ghs.googlehosted.com".  We are noticing the intermittent timeout for this site as well. Here again, the IP address is "74.125.200.121" - the same rouge IP which is timing out intermittently.

I'm able to consistently ping many other google IP addresses (around the above specified IP address). Only this IP seems to have the issue. 

What is the right forum to report such issues to Google?

Is there some workaround (routing to another IP address in the google IP farm) to get our site working?

[Ryan (Cloud Platform Support)]

Salutations Aravindan,

Our Issue Tracker is the best forum to report this. When you create it I need a few ping requests that fail, a tracert, your location and App ID. When you create it please post it here and I will investigate it. 

Side note, I have been pining for a while now without issue.

[Ruckmani Sivasubramanian Aravindan]

Thanks Ryan.

I've created an issue in the issue tracker: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=12223

Currently the ping is fine. In the issue I've given the information you asked:

- the output of ping requests when the failure happened

- tracert now (I don't have tracert when ping was failing)

- my location (Bangalore, India)

- app id: nittio-live

Regards,

Aravindan.