Google App Engine application instance recycling and response times

Question

I posted this on GAE for Java group, but I hope to get some answers here quicker :)

I decided to do some long-run performance tests on my application. I created some

Answer 1

This is definitely a tricky issue with AppEngine applications. The purists will tell you to look at why your application takes so long to start up and work backwards from there. In your case, the answer is obvious: you are using Spring, and it has to load many class files and instantiate many objects.

The pragmatic answer, if you can live without Spring, is to make sure that you app instance stays warm. You can either ping it from an external source frequently enough that AppEngine never unloads it, or you could use an AppEngine cron job that runs frequently enough to keep your app in-memory.

I am sure that Google despises the second option, as that runs against much of the fundamental ideas behind AE, but nevertheless, it is an issue that they and we 9as AE developers) must consider.

Here is a related discussion