Google App Engine Application Extremely slow

Question

I created a Hello World website in Google App Engine. It is using Django 1.1 without any patch.

Even though it is just a very simple web page, it takes long time and often it times out.

Any suggestions to solve this?

Note: It is responding fast after the first call.

Answer 1

Now Google has added a payment option "Always On" which is 0.30$ a day.

Using this feature, your application will not have to cold start any more.

Always On

While warmup requests help your application scale smoothly, they do not help if your application has very low amounts of traffic. For high-priority applications with low traffic, you can reserve instances via App Engine's Always On feature.

Always On is a premium feature which reserves three instances of your application, never turning them off, even if the application has no traffic. This mitigates the impact of loading requests on applications that have small or variable amounts of traffic. Additionally, if an Always On instance dies accidentally, App Engine automatically restarts the instance with a warmup request. As a result, Always On applications should be sure to do as much initialization as possible during warmup requests.

Even after enabling Always On, your application may experience loading requests if there is a sudden increase in traffic.

To enable Always On, go to the Billing Settings page in your application's Admin Console, and click the Always On checkbox.

http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/appengine/docs/adminconsole/instances.html

Answer 2

This is a horrible suggestion but I'll make it anyway:

Build a little client application or just use wget with cron to periodically access your app, maybe once every 5 minutes or so. That should keep Google from putting it into a dormant state.

I say this is a horrible suggestion because it's a waste of resources and an abuse of Google's free service. I'd expect you to do this only during a short testing/startup phase.