Until the loading request (spinning up a JVM) performance issues get sorted out, I can't see any serious site running Ruby on App Engine. It's actually an awes

Until the loading request (spinning up a JVM) performance issues get sorted out, I can't see any serious site running Ruby on App Engine. It's actually an awesome platform, except for one detail -- which is enormous: waiting 15+ seconds for a JVM to start up and respond to a request when either 1) your site hasn't been visited it the past 5 minutes or so, or 2) your current number of JVMs aren't sufficient, so another is needed. You're pretty much guaranteed to run into one of these scenarios regularly -- the first if your site is low-traffic and the second if your site is relatively high-traffic. Either way, users don't stick around and wait 15 seconds for a page to load. Other than that, I like the App Engine architecture much better than Heroku's, although there's a lot to like at Heroku as well. The good news for app engine is that Google has announced planned support for this (1) feature in their roadmap (2). Allowing us to pay to reserve an extra JVM at all times would eliminate the issue. (1) http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=2456 http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=24... (2) http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html