GAE ndb design, performance and use of repeated properties

Question

Say I have a picture gallery and a picture could potentially have 100k+ fans. Which ndb design is more efficient?

class picture(ndb.model):
    fanIds = ndb.         


        

Answer 1

Generally v1 would be much cheaper.

In terms of read/write costs, you pay per entity fetch/written, so you want to reduce the number of entities. version 1 will be cheaper. Significantly cheaper if you fetch every fan every time you fetch a picture.

However each entity is limited to 1MB. If you have 100k+ fans, you could hit that limit depending on the size of your fanId. That's not counting your other picture data, so you could blow that 1MB limit. You'll have to add some more complex code to handle overflow cases.

Large entities take longer to fetch than small entities. If you're going to fetch all the fans at once all the time, v1 will be better. If you're only going to fetch say 5 fans at any one point, v2 might be faster (only might). If on the other hand you try to pull 100k fan entities... that's gonna take forever.