4 ms·

Well, the bug report doesn't really invite quick attention. Simply reporting your observations is not enough: you should position yourself as a competent custom

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.

spqr 14y ago
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.
Ensorceled 14y ago
You pretty much only have bug reports and google groups. 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.
bodegajed 14y ago
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.
- meaty 14y ago
  If you were a VPS customer, you'd be less locked in and can just walk to another vendor so they actually are shit hot with support usually. It was obvious when I first tried it that GAE has crappy support.
  - blablabla123 14y ago
    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.
  - jfoster 14y ago
    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-have-about-the-cloud/ 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).
    - jrochkind1 14y ago
      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.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  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.
gojomo 14y ago
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.
thijser 14y ago
We filed a more concise bug report too: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8881 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8... 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.
- brudgers 14y ago
  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.
  - mark-r 14y ago
    "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.
blablabla123 14y ago
>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.

spqr 14y ago

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.

Ensorceled 14y ago

You pretty much only have bug reports and google groups. 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.

bodegajed 14y ago

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.

meaty 14y ago
If you were a VPS customer, you'd be less locked in and can just walk to another vendor so they actually are shit hot with support usually. It was obvious when I first tried it that GAE has crappy support.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  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.
- jfoster 14y ago
  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-have-about-the-cloud/ 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).
  - jrochkind1 14y ago
    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.
blablabla123 14y ago
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.

gojomo 14y ago

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.

thijser 14y ago

We filed a more concise bug report too: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8881 https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8... 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.

brudgers 14y ago
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.
- mark-r 14y ago
  "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.

blablabla123 14y ago

>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.