Why does Google App Engine support a single thread of execution only?

Question

Does anybody have an idea why Google App Engine permits only a single thread of execution for a deployed application?

I personally believe that it has something to d

Answer 1

I think this is a misleading question. The App Engine does not allow your application to spawn threads, but the app engine may launch multiple instances of your application or use some sort of threaded or multiprocess request handler. I don't know the specific details but without some sort of parallelism the app engine would be a pretty useless platform.

EDIT

My original answer incorrectly implied that threads are not a useful feature, they have many uses, but the majority of web developers do not manage threads within their applications. Threads are usually managed at lower levels of the application stack.