Because they did not post any kind of evidence (request logs, Pingdom report, etc.), not to mention the App ID in question (so that Google would know where to look). All too often, bug reports end up being some kind of misunderstanding.
"M/S is deprecated and there is a clear and straightforward path to migrating to HRD."
M/S was deprecated April 4, 2012, so it has been some time since the notice has been out there. High replication data store has been available for over 2 years now. Whether or not less than a year is too short a deprecation period is another issue.
because we're paying customers? my bill is peanuts, but i know there are many big customers, e.g. Khan Academy. and also they have Premier Support which is $500/mo.
"You just have to pay for support and you get support? I don't believe it, there must be more to it than that!"
Whether you believe it or not, a Premier account is what you need if you want support. You could argue that $500/mo is too expensive, but it is what it is.
The potential bad press that Google would get if Khan Academy had daily issues due bad GAE performance I'm sure that would cost them much more than the 500$/month that you're paying. Being big and nice(or cool) I think it gives and edge here.
I've paid over $50,000 a year for Google Maps. I assure you, their support sucks no matter how much you pay them. We pay a small fraction of that for AWS, and Amazon's support is infinitely better.
there is support if you pay for it. in general whenever I file a ticket I get a response within hours. that's at least as good(if not better) as working with any other vendor in my experience. So... where's this 0 support you are talking about?
Quick tip for anyone making a system with high load and daily or hourly quotas: When an account is created, assign a random start time (e.g. 05:43 for daily quotas or minute 12 for hourly) to measure that account's quotas against. Then you can avoid this issue of the system getting a huge spike in load when everyone's quota refreshes at the same time.
Well, the bug report doesn't really invite quick attention. Simply reporting your observations is not enough: you should position yourself as a competent customer, by explaining what you have done to ensure the problem isn't on your side. Mention the code hasn't changed, that you have no database cleanup cronjobs or similar running that could be interfering, etc.
My first instinct when I see a report like this is: he probably has some cronjob running he forgot about; perhaps one whose performance decreased with O(n^2).
By which I'm not saying that Google is right in not replying for days, but by which I am saying that as a customer, there are easy ways to get attention beyond shouting and threatening. Show it's an interesting problem and you're bound to get some techie's attention.
I consider him panicking more than shouting and threatening. I couldn't imagine having that kind of treatment as a vps customer else I'll be moving out asap.
Migrating is an effort but it is always possible. In fact, when you migrate you realize how independent you are. Even if you use tons of APIs, everybody has 'em even if their interfaces are different.
What are we actually talking about when discussing "good support" and "bad support"? Is it just someone nice to talk to whilst someone else fixes a problem for you? There was an interesting article along these lines by the former President of Enterprise at Google written recently: http://gigaom.com/2013/01/26/the-delusions-that-companies-ha...
In this case, the GAE feature that underlies this issue is the Master/Slave (MS) datastore. It's been deprecated for ages in favour of the High-Replication Datastore (HRD).
Maybe you don't rationally need someone to talk to when someone is fixing a problem for you -- but I think you need to know that the vendor is _aware_ of the problem, and is working on fixing it.
Or you start freaking out. And I don't think that's entirely irrational.
This is, among other things, why the 'post mortem' has become somewhat popular -- because it allows us to judge "Yeah, those guys DO know what they're doing, they're on top of things, the chances of outages are getting constantly smaller, not larger."
Has Google ever published such a "post-mortem" after an outage? Has Google ever even admitted there was an outage publically?
But also, yeah, rational or not, people like to have someone to talk to. In customer service in general, there are many studies showing that customers satisfaction will be higher when they are treated 'nicely' _without a solution_ than when they are treated brusquely but their problem is solved. This is not actually rational, and I'm not saying I'd like vendors to strive towards that model -- but it is apparently human psychology that vendors may want to take account of.
On the other hand, Google seems to be doing pretty fine how it is going. Although I don't know how GAE is doing, really, compared to competitors.
How Google does it, though, is basically no support at all, right? It's beyond 'good support' or 'bad support' -- with the possible exception of AdWords, is there any Google product where you can ever talk to a human about any support issue at all? For email that might be fine, especially when the email product is pretty darn reliable. For enterprise critical software... it would sure make me nervous.
He falls in to a trap of knowing machine behavior, but not dealing with people behavior.
Insanity #2: I need somebody to talk to when a service interruption occurs
You hear about an earthquake in California, you call your aunt to make sure she is ok.
You are getting bad weather in the area you live, your mom calls and checks on you.
The server you use disappears off the internet and your providers status page hasn't been updated for a week, you '...'?
When something goes wrong, it's not an event that effects everybody (even if it is), it's an event that effects you. As long as humans are still involved in the purchasing and managing of servers you'll always need someone to call and yell at/be soothed by.
That's true. I think that his broader point still stands, though. Once you get beyond variants of "are you working on it or do I need to convince you to?" the role of support is basically catering to irrational desires.
Because of this I moved away from GAE over a year ago. And not me alone, when GAE was still hot, 2-3 years ago, you could read tons of blog articles with unsatisfied customers.
So it doesn't surprise me to read about weird performance degradations. Since years GAE suffers from such problems.
Maybe they don't care about small customers and love to hear about them move to Heroku or to good old Virtual Servers. It would be polite to tell upfront though.
I may be misunderstanding GAE, but isn't the reporter's 'StayUp' servlet a minimal test case? Without any dependence on other datastores or processes, it seems to be showing that something is seriously amiss when handling trivial requests. It's like a demo "Hello World" app... that stops working in a certain time range each day.
This is a daily outage that affects all our master/slave appengine applications. We know these applications are 'deprecated', but we're still paying significant money for the service and therefore hadn't expected 'deprecated' to mean 'won't be fixed when there are problems'.
Migration to HRD is not trivial even with the tool provided by Google. HRD has a different consistency model, blob keys and associated image serving URLs will change by migrating, and last time we checked any deletes that happen during migration (which can take days) will not make it into the migrated app.
Shedding responsibility for problems arising from continued use is pretty much the essential rationale for deprecating a piece of software. Google has never appeared particularly concerned about backward compatibility or facilitating small segments of its customer and user bases.
"Google has never appeared particularly concerned..." seems to be a recurring theme. The company was designed to work at large scale, and individual problems don't get the attention they would at more customer-oriented companies.
>Well, the bug report doesn't really invite quick attention. Simply reporting your observations is not enough: you should position yourself as a competent customer
If it was one person experiencing the problem, you would be right. But it's a number of people.
Keep blaming that victim. As for me, I moved off GAE over a year ago and now I wear as many short skirts as I want without the fear of someone telling me I deserve to be raped by Google.
I'm sorry, but this is the price you pay for running your business that is dependent TOTALLY on a 3rd party service. Forget Google, everyone out there is most likely the same, that's why it's important for you to run your 'apps' on something you have control over - Like Linode, AWS, Rackspace, Openshift, etc. and also have back-up nodes from other providers for redundancy, for emergency situations, incase of
storms, etc.
I would recommend trying your apps on OpenStack (Openshift in particular), which doesn't have the vendor lock-in, which you face right now.
God DAMN it, I'm sick of seeing this comment anytime a service goes down or basically anything anywhere has a problem of any sort. We depend on third parties, all of us, to some extent. Stop it!
Having never used GAE, it would nice if someone could expand M/S and HRD for me.
It looks like OP of the bug-report is using a depreciated feature/program which according to the Project Member is causing latency issues at a specific time daily. But that could not be the real issue since another commentator who is using the new HRD is also having the same problem. It is even frustrating for people who are reading this. All it implies is the lack of communication from Google when something goes awry. Come on Google, stop reinforcing my stereotypes about your customer support!
Selling to a customer is different than selling to a business, you may have a great product at a great price but if you offer terrible CS, in the B2B world everyone is going to avoid you. It is a place where support is valued more than the product itself.
Therefore, unless you start offering a decent CS, you can lower your price all you want, I will be sticking with AWS.
The rates are the same ($1 per million writes and $0.70 per million reads beyond the daily free threshold), but the daily free threshold is 0.05 million of each for master/slave, and 0.01 million of each for high-replication.
For small applications it costs more because of thresholds for free services is lower. In our case it costs a lot more since some of things we were doing need another instance on HRD that we didn't need on M/S
The problem with saying things like "Support packages are available", is that time and again we see paying Google customers with support packages being treated awfully.
These are paying customers who are paying a non-trivial amount of money for support (though not the "Premium" support in this case, which is an extra $500 per month for GAE).
We're a paying customer of GAE. I think it's quite clear that paying for the basic service doesn't include support beyond the public issue tracker and the forums. Support packages start at $150 per month, and at that point you get a 4 hour response time. I think that's entirely reasonable. We have yet to sign up for a support level, but then again we're not really seeing any troubles with the service.
Ok, so here's the deal. If your app runs exclusively on GAE you've essentially tied yourself to one cloud vendor. Now disregarding the respective benefits and drawbacks of google as a hosting company for your app (I would never do that), being dependent on one cloud provider is a very bad idea. No matter if you run on EC2, Azure or GAE, if you can't seamlessly switch to another provider, you're screwed. These all go down regularly and have issues. They're big companies, you're a small company, you have no such thing as "recourse". The court of public opinion will not save your company.
Agree with this to an extent however the company I work for deploys on AWS and is far too cautious about vendor lock-in, to the point where we use AWS basically as a VPS, not a cloud service, and get none of the advantages (and all of the disadvantages, e.g. worse performance, higher price).
Remember the old "thundering herd" problem with Apache children and things of that nature? You'd basically have a whole bunch of processes which had a listening fd from an earlier call to listen(). When a new connection would come in, the kernel would wake all of them, even though only one of them would actually have something to get. The others would go through the process for nothing. It caused a big performance hit back in the day.
Well, imagine now that you have a directory or lock service where you can store things and perform atomic updates. When you do a write to something in it, it fans out to all of its clients, and they all wake up (nearly) simultaneously and receive the update. They then have to do whatever processing you do with new data of that type.
If they all do this at the same time, then you have no processes left to service incoming requests. They're all identically busy with whatever mutexes held in order to apply those config changes safely, so no other work happens on those clients while they load in the new data.
It's not so much that it's taking a mutex and is getting stuck for a little bit, since that's going to happen no matter what. It's that all of the children do it at the same time, so there's nobody to service your hit, and you're guaranteed to get stuck. If it was spread out, then only some percentage of incoming requests would get stuck behind this. The others would get lucky and would hit another instance which either had already run it or hadn't yet run it.
I'm not saying this is what's going on here, but it sure sounds familiar.
On what basis do you think these issues are related? The bug report provides very little insight in what's going on, only that there's a severe performance degradation at 9AM.
The thundering herd problem applied to waking up child processes is one possible explanation, but there are dozens of other explanations that are just as likely, based on the information we're provided with.
The commenter you are replying to is a former Google employee; the description of the lock service sounds like Chubby (http://research.google.com/archive/chubby.html), App Engine likely uses some sort of distributed directory service for keeping track of things like quotas.
9 AM in Brussels is midnight here on the west coast if I've done my time zone math properly. It's the perfect time to push something. Unfortunately, if that means having everything snap-to and then freeze for a couple of seconds, that's not good.
Again, I don't know if this is what happened here. I've just seen this sort of thing before.
A GAE user sees a problem of his service being slow, writes a frantic bug report with caps and exclamation marks and threatens to leave GAE. As a GAE user myself, two questions come to mind:
1. Is GAE outside of their .9995 SLA* uptime? If they aren't, then it probably isn't important enough spend time looking into it. Customers cannot expect better than the agreed upon uptime percent, and hosting companies are obligated to reimburse customers if they go below SLA. Both of these are covered in the SLA doc.
2. Is it reproducible? So far, the bug report mentions 2 people out of GAE users. Is 2 people enough to say its a problem with GAE? One person is panicked, and the other provides few details for the bug report.
1. 0.9995 SLA means about 6 minutes of downtime a month. Since it's a daily event, I'm guessing that yes, the SLA is violated.
2. It's a problem that is occurring daily, with a test case that has pretty much no code at all. That in itself does not prove anything, but it really makes me wonder how it could be a problem on the user's side.
To their credit, people are apparently using something that's been deprecated and should be changed regardless. At least, that was their conclusion when it was changed to wontfix. The replies are very rare and curt though, I can't really say it's quality service when you're paying for a product.
Customer support from Google has always been like this as far as I've experienced and heard. There is no way to actually reach and converse with anyone, regardless whether you are paying them for the service or what kind of request it is.
Once a Google employee randomly replied to a complaint of mine about Google+ (I didn't even +mention them). After a few comments and him confirming that it was added to the bugs list, I asked if it was okay to +mention him in the future with similar issues. It was okay. I did. He never showed his face again. (His profile still says "Works at Google+".)
Another Google employee I know online also never replies to anything concerning Google. I know he works on the Google+ project, but I can only hope he passes on any bugs I +mentioned him in.
For Youtube, you can post in their forums but merely hope for a reply. Copyright complaint disputes are no priority, either.
I haven't used many paid products, but I have read about their customer support being one of the very worst and also have never been able to find a single e-mail address or phone number to get support at for any service.
Edit: By the way, I would have moved away from the Google Apps Engine a long time ago if my app went down every morning during rush hour for 10 days straight.
Few people (who act obnoxious as hell) report a problem that can be solved by moving away from a deprecated system, yet they fail to even read the note because they're busy smashing exclamation marks into the issue tracker.
The two datastores even have the same API. As long as your app doesn't depend on the exact performance characteristics of the old one, the migration is very straightforward. I did it for one of my apps in a morning and was done well before lunch.
The problem apparently also occurs on the non-deprecated system. I can understand their frustration after not getting a reply for X days on what seems to be a critical issue for them. That's not "obnoxious as hell", that's customers panicking. You really don't want your customers panicking about your service.
This customer is complaining about a service component which has been deprecated since almost 11 months ago. There is a tool which migrates application data from the old datastore to the new one. When you don't move off of deprecated infrastructure, I'd say you've set yourself up for problems.
11 months huh? That's barely anything for larger enterprise customers, about long enough to make it onto a project plan. Most enterprise software companies will provide support for 5-8 years.
Almost 11 months you say? Well any self respecting hobbyist hacker at home should be able to whip up an upgrade in a week. The rest of us are trying to run a business and don't appreciate quickly deprecated products with no support less than a year after it is deprecated.
Windiws XP was released 12 years ago, has been deprecated for years and only recently stopped support by Microsoft.
If Google isn't willing to provide the same level of support they shoe just admit they're for hobbyists.
There are tools that can migrate you from python 2 to python 3, or from Oracle to postgres. But it's not something you do lightly. Switching from M/S to HRD in AppEngine is similarly not something you do lightly.
Google support borders upon the farcical. It doesn't appear to be costing them too much money in the grand scheme of things, which is sort of surprising to me.
I had a support guy tell me I had to get Apple's legal team to contact Google so I could use the "Mac" trademark, because I happened to be selling a piece of software that ran on OS X. Like that's ever going to happen. My ad simply said "Try ____, a better way to _____ on Windows and Mac.", linking them to http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/guidelinesfor3rdparties... didn't quite cut it, apparently, even though it clearly states that such use is acceptable under "2. Compatibility" near the top of the page. i.e. I can say my product runs on Mac if in fact it runs on Mac.
Approving a ten word ad takes Google over a week, in my experience. Baffling.
All this with their adwords $100 free trial. All that trial did was convince me that I should never ever in the life of the universe commit any money to Google, because they made it starkly apparent that I would never get what I paid for... running honest ads for honest products in a reasonable timeframe. I went with other ad networks in the end and had zero trouble whatsoever, and infinitely faster approval times. I suppose I may have had a smaller audience, but the headaches Google causes aren't worth the extra money.
Someone is going to come along and pull the rug out from under Google eventually. You can't rest on your laurels forever.
I am also a GAE-user, I have had no problems like the OP. But I start to miss a fundamental feature, sockets. I have worked around it by using other services and polling.
Maybe wrong forum, but is there any infrastructure templates for setting up a scalable web/db/loadbalancer/memcached for a simple tradional webservice, in my case a game?
I want to be able to sleep at night, and easily scale up by adding some more machines in case of higher load.
I could use denormalized myslq/postgre or mongodb for speed. Preferred language is Python (or maybe c# or java).
Depending on your budget (isn't it always..?), speak to Rightscale - they provide a set of frameworks to deploy infrastructure to various cloud platforms, and can handle auto-scaling and all that stuff.
Many on the thread say the reporters are over-reacting. They are not. What would amazon do? They would not consider this an issue, would respond in less than 24 hours, and would take complete responsibility. GAE is a pay service. I think this level of service is pathetic.
As noted the only attempt at diagnosis is completely wrong (even the reporter is not on MS) and very late.
Not surprising... the second most-voted bug in Google Code, reported exactly a year ago ( http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=24324 ) deplores the removal of a feature that was already there (the Updates page) and was the single most useful feature in Google Code for many of us. After one year and more than 800 people registering their interest on the issue, they haven't even explained why they removed it or whether there are any plans of brinding it back.
It happens that 9 AM Brussels time is midnight pacific time. I'm sure Google is running some maintentance cron at midnight thinking "This is a low demand time," and it is, across the US, but not in Brussels. These are old instances, and Google probably doesn't want to re-time or rewrite the cron job to be more efficient.
Customer support of Google really sucks!
Currently the GAE cloud has a reliability problem (also for new customers).
Instances are restarted like crazy. This leads to downtimes. But that's not enough. Customers have even to pay more(!) instance hours because of this.
There is the running gag on the mailing-list: "Whenever GAE is unreliable for weeks Google needed to make revenue targets ;-)"
I manage the 3rd line support of some of the busiest websites in the world (we provide back-end e-commerce software).
I can't say I think much of google's response here. Nearly two weeks before the first comment, and then shut down after 2 days and a question directed at who knows who, and no explanation?
The analysis elsewhere on here suggests they're violating SLA, so this should get more attention. I'm guessing support is under-resourced @ google, and the culture of support is a bit shabby (no acknowledgement of inconvenience or indication or evidence of work undertaken in the background) - hardly surprising for a large-scale software business based on free services.
A bug tracker seems like a horrible way to report production (or non-production) support issues. This is the same bug tracker OSS projects on Google Code use.
Is it really helpful for the public to comment on my support request? Seems like the signal to noise ratio would be quite low, and then you get inane comments like:
I got here from HackerNews, but after seeing the original poster spam the forums in multiple places and have a bad attitude, I can't blame Google for not fixing what looks to me like a non-issue.
Fuck 'em.
You have to believe that the choice of tools has some bearing on the quality of the response from Google. Seems like there is very little incentive for any "Project members" to trawl through open bug reports when no one is ever responsible.
128 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadCan anyone explain why this is not possible for them?
Wonderful Google support apart, there are a lot of alternatives out there.
"M/S is deprecated and there is a clear and straightforward path to migrating to HRD."
M/S was deprecated April 4, 2012, so it has been some time since the notice has been out there. High replication data store has been available for over 2 years now. Whether or not less than a year is too short a deprecation period is another issue.
Khan Academy may have it easier, I'm sure Google won't let them down
Really, go somewhere else, spend less money and have better support.
(At the expense of, if you're lucky, Google will give you almost zero headaches)
But you can bet that if Khan Academy has a problem it will be looked into with extra attention.
Also, Khan academy receives funding from Google ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_academy ), so I don't think it boils down to only having a Premier account.
Whether you believe it or not, a Premier account is what you need if you want support. You could argue that $500/mo is too expensive, but it is what it is.
What I don't believe is that the support provided by Google is good or sufficient. Based on experiences with paying Google Apps, I'd say it's not.
https://cloud.google.com/support/packages
Either you click "Start Free Trial" or "Contact Sales". The one is automatic registration, the other involves human interaction.
I guess Google Apps illustrates this the best. IMHO it's somehow the glue that keeps your stuff together when you use Google as hoster.
My first instinct when I see a report like this is: he probably has some cronjob running he forgot about; perhaps one whose performance decreased with O(n^2).
By which I'm not saying that Google is right in not replying for days, but by which I am saying that as a customer, there are easy ways to get attention beyond shouting and threatening. Show it's an interesting problem and you're bound to get some techie's attention.
It was obvious when I first tried it that GAE has crappy support.
In this case, the GAE feature that underlies this issue is the Master/Slave (MS) datastore. It's been deprecated for ages in favour of the High-Replication Datastore (HRD).
Or you start freaking out. And I don't think that's entirely irrational.
This is, among other things, why the 'post mortem' has become somewhat popular -- because it allows us to judge "Yeah, those guys DO know what they're doing, they're on top of things, the chances of outages are getting constantly smaller, not larger."
Has Google ever published such a "post-mortem" after an outage? Has Google ever even admitted there was an outage publically?
But also, yeah, rational or not, people like to have someone to talk to. In customer service in general, there are many studies showing that customers satisfaction will be higher when they are treated 'nicely' _without a solution_ than when they are treated brusquely but their problem is solved. This is not actually rational, and I'm not saying I'd like vendors to strive towards that model -- but it is apparently human psychology that vendors may want to take account of.
On the other hand, Google seems to be doing pretty fine how it is going. Although I don't know how GAE is doing, really, compared to competitors.
How Google does it, though, is basically no support at all, right? It's beyond 'good support' or 'bad support' -- with the possible exception of AdWords, is there any Google product where you can ever talk to a human about any support issue at all? For email that might be fine, especially when the email product is pretty darn reliable. For enterprise critical software... it would sure make me nervous.
Insanity #2: I need somebody to talk to when a service interruption occurs
You hear about an earthquake in California, you call your aunt to make sure she is ok.
You are getting bad weather in the area you live, your mom calls and checks on you.
The server you use disappears off the internet and your providers status page hasn't been updated for a week, you '...'?
When something goes wrong, it's not an event that effects everybody (even if it is), it's an event that effects you. As long as humans are still involved in the purchasing and managing of servers you'll always need someone to call and yell at/be soothed by.
So it doesn't surprise me to read about weird performance degradations. Since years GAE suffers from such problems.
Maybe they don't care about small customers and love to hear about them move to Heroku or to good old Virtual Servers. It would be polite to tell upfront though.
This is a daily outage that affects all our master/slave appengine applications. We know these applications are 'deprecated', but we're still paying significant money for the service and therefore hadn't expected 'deprecated' to mean 'won't be fixed when there are problems'.
Migration to HRD is not trivial even with the tool provided by Google. HRD has a different consistency model, blob keys and associated image serving URLs will change by migrating, and last time we checked any deletes that happen during migration (which can take days) will not make it into the migrated app.
If it was one person experiencing the problem, you would be right. But it's a number of people.
As other commenters note: they DID provide a minimal test case that showed the problem wasn't their side.
Unfortunately with GAE support screaming and yelling is pretty much the only recourse.
I would recommend trying your apps on OpenStack (Openshift in particular), which doesn't have the vendor lock-in, which you face right now.
"Having control over" something is a scale, it's not binary.
It looks like OP of the bug-report is using a depreciated feature/program which according to the Project Member is causing latency issues at a specific time daily. But that could not be the real issue since another commentator who is using the new HRD is also having the same problem. It is even frustrating for people who are reading this. All it implies is the lack of communication from Google when something goes awry. Come on Google, stop reinforcing my stereotypes about your customer support!
Selling to a customer is different than selling to a business, you may have a great product at a great price but if you offer terrible CS, in the B2B world everyone is going to avoid you. It is a place where support is valued more than the product itself.
Therefore, unless you start offering a decent CS, you can lower your price all you want, I will be sticking with AWS.
HRD is High Replication Datastore: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/mi...
M/S is deprecated, and HRD is the new hotness (and it conveniently costs more).
For example, this guy was a paying Google customer but couldn't get help http://www.sultansolutions.com/google-voice-lost-number/
These are paying customers who are paying a non-trivial amount of money for support (though not the "Premium" support in this case, which is an extra $500 per month for GAE).
In this case, Google's response is seemingly "It might (or might not) be a system-wide issue, but we don't care - we won't fix it".
There's no indication in this case that someone paying $500 a month for the premium support would get a better answer.
You can host your own applications using AppScale or Typhoonae.
Moving applications is easy. Moving data is much worse.
Well, imagine now that you have a directory or lock service where you can store things and perform atomic updates. When you do a write to something in it, it fans out to all of its clients, and they all wake up (nearly) simultaneously and receive the update. They then have to do whatever processing you do with new data of that type.
If they all do this at the same time, then you have no processes left to service incoming requests. They're all identically busy with whatever mutexes held in order to apply those config changes safely, so no other work happens on those clients while they load in the new data.
It's not so much that it's taking a mutex and is getting stuck for a little bit, since that's going to happen no matter what. It's that all of the children do it at the same time, so there's nobody to service your hit, and you're guaranteed to get stuck. If it was spread out, then only some percentage of incoming requests would get stuck behind this. The others would get lucky and would hit another instance which either had already run it or hadn't yet run it.
I'm not saying this is what's going on here, but it sure sounds familiar.
The thundering herd problem applied to waking up child processes is one possible explanation, but there are dozens of other explanations that are just as likely, based on the information we're provided with.
Again, I don't know if this is what happened here. I've just seen this sort of thing before.
1. Is GAE outside of their .9995 SLA* uptime? If they aren't, then it probably isn't important enough spend time looking into it. Customers cannot expect better than the agreed upon uptime percent, and hosting companies are obligated to reimburse customers if they go below SLA. Both of these are covered in the SLA doc.
2. Is it reproducible? So far, the bug report mentions 2 people out of GAE users. Is 2 people enough to say its a problem with GAE? One person is panicked, and the other provides few details for the bug report.
*https://developers.google.com/appengine/sla
There is no SLA for M/S applications (which run on completely different infrastructure). GAE has only ever offered a SLA for HRD applications.
Customer support from Google has always been like this as far as I've experienced and heard. There is no way to actually reach and converse with anyone, regardless whether you are paying them for the service or what kind of request it is.
Once a Google employee randomly replied to a complaint of mine about Google+ (I didn't even +mention them). After a few comments and him confirming that it was added to the bugs list, I asked if it was okay to +mention him in the future with similar issues. It was okay. I did. He never showed his face again. (His profile still says "Works at Google+".)
Another Google employee I know online also never replies to anything concerning Google. I know he works on the Google+ project, but I can only hope he passes on any bugs I +mentioned him in.
For Youtube, you can post in their forums but merely hope for a reply. Copyright complaint disputes are no priority, either.
I haven't used many paid products, but I have read about their customer support being one of the very worst and also have never been able to find a single e-mail address or phone number to get support at for any service.
Edit: By the way, I would have moved away from the Google Apps Engine a long time ago if my app went down every morning during rush hour for 10 days straight.
Few people (who act obnoxious as hell) report a problem that can be solved by moving away from a deprecated system, yet they fail to even read the note because they're busy smashing exclamation marks into the issue tracker.
When your datastore gets deprecated, you act sooner rather than later.
I had a Nexus 7 go AWOL at Christmas and I've never had such a shambolic customer service experience.
They have absolutely no respect or customer service ethos when it comes to people who are actually paying them real cash money.
Not in a million years would I sign off on hosting a production project on App Engine.
Windiws XP was released 12 years ago, has been deprecated for years and only recently stopped support by Microsoft.
If Google isn't willing to provide the same level of support they shoe just admit they're for hobbyists.
I had a support guy tell me I had to get Apple's legal team to contact Google so I could use the "Mac" trademark, because I happened to be selling a piece of software that ran on OS X. Like that's ever going to happen. My ad simply said "Try ____, a better way to _____ on Windows and Mac.", linking them to http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/guidelinesfor3rdparties... didn't quite cut it, apparently, even though it clearly states that such use is acceptable under "2. Compatibility" near the top of the page. i.e. I can say my product runs on Mac if in fact it runs on Mac.
Approving a ten word ad takes Google over a week, in my experience. Baffling.
All this with their adwords $100 free trial. All that trial did was convince me that I should never ever in the life of the universe commit any money to Google, because they made it starkly apparent that I would never get what I paid for... running honest ads for honest products in a reasonable timeframe. I went with other ad networks in the end and had zero trouble whatsoever, and infinitely faster approval times. I suppose I may have had a smaller audience, but the headaches Google causes aren't worth the extra money.
Someone is going to come along and pull the rug out from under Google eventually. You can't rest on your laurels forever.
/rant
Maybe wrong forum, but is there any infrastructure templates for setting up a scalable web/db/loadbalancer/memcached for a simple tradional webservice, in my case a game?
I want to be able to sleep at night, and easily scale up by adding some more machines in case of higher load.
I could use denormalized myslq/postgre or mongodb for speed. Preferred language is Python (or maybe c# or java).
Any ideas?
As noted the only attempt at diagnosis is completely wrong (even the reporter is not on MS) and very late.
References
Current Issue: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=88...
Same issue from last year that took weeks to be resolved (check last comments!): http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=80...
Some Pros and Cons of Google App Engine in this blog-post: http://www.mosbase.com/
I can't say I think much of google's response here. Nearly two weeks before the first comment, and then shut down after 2 days and a question directed at who knows who, and no explanation?
The analysis elsewhere on here suggests they're violating SLA, so this should get more attention. I'm guessing support is under-resourced @ google, and the culture of support is a bit shabby (no acknowledgement of inconvenience or indication or evidence of work undertaken in the background) - hardly surprising for a large-scale software business based on free services.
Is it really helpful for the public to comment on my support request? Seems like the signal to noise ratio would be quite low, and then you get inane comments like:
I got here from HackerNews, but after seeing the original poster spam the forums in multiple places and have a bad attitude, I can't blame Google for not fixing what looks to me like a non-issue.
Fuck 'em.
You have to believe that the choice of tools has some bearing on the quality of the response from Google. Seems like there is very little incentive for any "Project members" to trawl through open bug reports when no one is ever responsible.