Identify why Google app engine is slow

Question

I developed an application for client that uses Play framework 1.x and runs on GAE. The app works great, but sometimes is crazy slow. It takes around 30 seconds to load simple page but sometimes it runs faster - no code change whatsoever.

Are there any way to identify why it's running slow? I tried to contact support but I couldnt find any telephone number or email. Also there is no response on official google group.

How would you approach this problem? Currently my customer is very angry because of slow loading time, but switching to other provider is last option at the moment.

Answer 1

Use GAE Appstats to profile your remote procedure calls. All of the RPCs are slow (Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL, ...), so if you can reduce the amount of RPCs or can use some caching datastructures, use them -> your application will be much faster. But you can see with appstats which parts are slow and if they need attention :) .

For example, I've created a Google Cloud Storage cache for my application and decreased execution time from 2 minutes to under 30 seconds. The RPCs are a bottleneck in the GAE.

Answer 2

Google does not usually provide a contact support for a lot of services. The issue described about google app engine slowness is probably caused by a cold start. Google app engine front-end instances sleep after about 15 minutes. You could write a cron job to ping instances every 14 minutes to keep the nodes up.