GAE :Process terminated because the backend took too long to shut down in backends job

Question

My backend job is working on the basis of cron job(every 4 hour).But it is terminated with out processing the data. The server log displays as following :

500 15377121ms 0kb instance=0 AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine)
E 2012-10-05 01:50:18.044 Process terminated because the backend took too long to shutdown.

How to handle this kind of error in my program

Answer 1

That error is generated when App Engine needs to shut your backend down but the backend fails to exit within 30 seconds. Some reasons why this might be happening are listed here. Depending on the type of error, App Engine may be sending your backend a notification of the impending shutdown, so it's a good idea to register a shutdown handler so you can gather more data about your app's state when this is about to happen.

If you are seeing this regularly there is probably a systematic explanation, such as your job's memory exceeding the maximum for the backend's class.