3 ms·

That's unreasonably expensive. For $68.46 he payed for a day you can have an "el-cheapo" dedicated box or a great VPS for a month. I still don't understand why

That's unreasonably expensive. For $68.46 he payed for a day you can have an "el-cheapo" dedicated box or a great VPS for a month. I still don't understand why people trade a bit of system administration and superb performance for a vendor lock and insane prices.

robryan 15y ago
Yeah trading back a little bit of system admin you can get a pretty serious amount of server power on AWS for that amount of money.
jcheng 15y ago
But it's 880 instance-hours per day. So assuming that "el-cheapo" dedicated box has similar performance characteristics to one GAE instance, then you'd need 37 of those boxes. My question is why the heck 31.42 CPU hours turned into 880 frontend instance hours, and whether this is something a lot of other GAE apps are seeing as well.
- jonknee 15y ago
  He has a lot of instances spun up waiting to do work. This is your choice, but if you want to be able to handle spikes without latency troubles, it's what you should do. None appear to be doing a lot of work in this case, so he should have definitely tried messing with the settings before closing shop.
- ww520 15y ago
  Google's instance-hour is process-instance-hour. The current GAE Python can only serve one web request by one process. Multiple web requests coming in would spin up multiple processes. Besides the CPU, Google charges the app while the process is waiting for IO, like waiting for receiving/sending to the browser. But measuring process-instance-hour is misleading. In a typical web box, spinning up an extra process takes very little resource since most process memory are shared with the parent process, and most web apps are IO bound, like waiting for network/file/DB, idling taking little CPU. In a server box, many processes can be crammed in (like the shared hosting box). But Google counts those duplicate processes as separate ones and charge the idle time these processes take. That's why you see the outrageous bill. What's more insane is that Google charges the process-instance-hour like a machine-instance-hour. GAE charges $0.08/hr for process-instance-hour while AWS charges $0.02 to $0.08/hr for the whole machine.
ww520 15y ago
And you basically trade sysadmin time with developer time in working around GAE's idiosyncrasy and proprietary API.

robryan 15y ago

Yeah trading back a little bit of system admin you can get a pretty serious amount of server power on AWS for that amount of money.

jcheng 15y ago

But it's 880 instance-hours per day. So assuming that "el-cheapo" dedicated box has similar performance characteristics to one GAE instance, then you'd need 37 of those boxes. My question is why the heck 31.42 CPU hours turned into 880 frontend instance hours, and whether this is something a lot of other GAE apps are seeing as well.

jonknee 15y ago
He has a lot of instances spun up waiting to do work. This is your choice, but if you want to be able to handle spikes without latency troubles, it's what you should do. None appear to be doing a lot of work in this case, so he should have definitely tried messing with the settings before closing shop.
ww520 15y ago
Google's instance-hour is process-instance-hour. The current GAE Python can only serve one web request by one process. Multiple web requests coming in would spin up multiple processes. Besides the CPU, Google charges the app while the process is waiting for IO, like waiting for receiving/sending to the browser. But measuring process-instance-hour is misleading. In a typical web box, spinning up an extra process takes very little resource since most process memory are shared with the parent process, and most web apps are IO bound, like waiting for network/file/DB, idling taking little CPU. In a server box, many processes can be crammed in (like the shared hosting box). But Google counts those duplicate processes as separate ones and charge the idle time these processes take. That's why you see the outrageous bill. What's more insane is that Google charges the process-instance-hour like a machine-instance-hour. GAE charges $0.08/hr for process-instance-hour while AWS charges $0.02 to $0.08/hr for the whole machine.

ww520 15y ago

And you basically trade sysadmin time with developer time in working around GAE's idiosyncrasy and proprietary API.