Yep, cold hits are a pain. They're bad for low traffic apps because App Engine will deallocate all resources if your app hasn't been hit in a while. Interesting

Yep, cold hits are a pain. They're bad for low traffic apps because App Engine will deallocate all resources if your app hasn't been hit in a while. Interestingly, cold hits are bad for apps with spiking traffic, too: as your load spikes, App Engine tasks new machines each of which may experience a cold hit. (It depends on their caching internals, subject to change.) As for use_library() vs App Engine Patch: for me, the perf issue is primary. On the other hand, AEP offers a lot of functionality out-of-box that you don't get with raw use_library() django.