No Google, It's Not Us, It's You!

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Steve

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Sep 9, 2011, 4:18:25 PM9/9/11
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Your new pricing scheme blows no matter how reasonable you try to make it sound.


Steve Sherrie

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Sep 9, 2011, 4:50:25 PM9/9/11
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That's funny, cause Google just upped the free instance hours to 28 from 24, so you'd be about the same, without any optimizations.

Steve


On 11-09-09 04:18 PM, Steve wrote:
Your new pricing scheme blows no matter how reasonable you try to make it sound.


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Steve

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:11:46 PM9/9/11
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Yeah, great.  So when my app farts and uses 3 minutes of CPU time I can look forward to just barely blowing past the free quote by a half hour.  Yay...

Original Steve

Steve Sherrie

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:20:55 PM9/9/11
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No offense (some offense), but it sounds like your application is wildly
inefficient. You should crowd source a solution by offering up your code
for review/improvement.

Steve Sherrie

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Steve

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:27:34 PM9/9/11
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That's probably the exact opposite of the problem.  The problem is that I spent tremendous effort optimizing the application based on the previous guidelines and best practices.  That's why it's only consuming 3 minutes of CPU time.

Oh, and none taken, even if a little implied.  ;)

--Steve

Francois Masurel

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:30:11 PM9/9/11
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"Google just upped the free instance hours to 28 from 24"

Pretty interesting...  Where have you read this ?

François

Barry Hunter

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:31:42 PM9/9/11
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http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/

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Steve Sherrie

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:40:13 PM9/9/11
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But in all seriousness, you're saying it would be a gargantuan feat to improve those figures? 

To get such a extreme difference (3min cpu => 28+ frontend instance hours) you're probably heavily relying on synchronous RPCs in some way, and that's exactly the kind of thing that can be made substantially more cost-efficient under the new billing with relatively little effort. Is this the case?

Stove (I saw bridesmaids yesterday)

Francois MASUREL

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:41:50 PM9/9/11
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Thanx.

Jon McAlister

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:52:36 PM9/9/11
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The app is relatively quick. The cause of the instance hours is that
the app has a cron job which runs once every two minutes. It returns
quickly, but it keeps the instance pegged all day long. So, low-cpu
but high instance-usage.

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Rishi Arora

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Sep 9, 2011, 5:57:26 PM9/9/11
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If that's the case, you can split the load between a front-end and a backend instance and still stay within the free quota limits.  Run the cron job on a backend for 9 free hours, and on the front-end for 15 hours.  And just because your're using 24 total instance hours doesn't mean the app is not scaleable.  If the cron job currently takes 1 second to do its work every two minutes, but later that expands 30x to 30 seconds, you're still within the free quota limit.  Or if you want to make it twice is frequent, you're still within the free quota.

Steve

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Sep 9, 2011, 6:00:46 PM9/9/11
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Yeah, the question (in my mind) is with the sliders set to maximum latency and minimum instances why does the scheduler spin up an extra instance when the single instance could do fine on its own?  And was the Max-Idle-Instances=0 bug marked WONTFIX?  Just kidding, I already know that answer; I just think it's kinda crappy.

--Steve

Steve

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Sep 9, 2011, 6:11:51 PM9/9/11
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That is a good idea, thank you.

It's still irritating that after many app refactorings and entity migrations to optimize to the previous GAE flaming hoops and best practices now again I need to convolute the program with more contortions.  At one time I thought one of GAE's best features was its straight-forward APIs and programming style.  It's as if the Python runtime didn't have enough bondage and discipline so Google had to add it back in somehow.

--Steve

Rishi Arora

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Sep 9, 2011, 6:15:22 PM9/9/11
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And I now fear that if pricing changes again in a different direction in the future, the optimization we're doing now will also become useless.  In effect, I'm trying to "game the system" - doing whatever I can to meet the free quota, until my app starts generating some revenue.  And I suppose doing things like that does sometime bite in the future.  In your case, your past effort may seem to have gone waste, given new pricing schemes, but it probably still goes a long way for future scalability.

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Greg

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Sep 9, 2011, 8:48:08 PM9/9/11
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On Sep 10, 10:15 am, Rishi Arora <rishi.ar...@ship-rack.com> wrote:
> And I now fear that if pricing changes again in a different direction in the future

I think it's a good assumption that as Appengine moves out of preview
and into commercial mode, the new billing structure will not change
significantly in the future. I'm sure there will be tweaks (up or
down) in the charges for each resource, but this is how it's going to
be for the foreseeable future.
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