The time for a DB request depends a lot on the particular request. If you're querying by key then it's usually ~30 ms. Their memcached is only "much" slower th

The time for a DB request depends a lot on the particular request. If you're querying by key then it's usually ~30 ms. Their memcached is only "much" slower than actual memcached if you run your "actual" memcached in the same computer or some rack as your client servers. Google memcached vs external memcached have almost identical performance, it all depends on where are your servers. If you were running your memcached servers in the same datacenter, but different rack, you will find out that you're only slightly faster or same speed than Google's memcached service. I want AppEngine to improve its speed as much as you want, trust me, but with current limits is already possible to build a web application. We did it in Panoramio, and others did it too.