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by dsulli 5464 days ago
I was using this on a project for a while. But compared to running the application with PHP, it was always slower. Sure, I've developed applications with PHP since 2001, so I really know how to tweak it and optimize it. But, with App Engine it was really frustrating. Requests really took long to complete, and there was no real way to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. We created an 'always on' instance, but it was still quite sluggish compared to the exact app running on a standard linux, apache, PHP system.

I would still try it again down the road, but it's really not a good fit for what I'm currently doing.
1 comments
jbaker 5464 days ago
Just out of curiosity, how would you describe what you are currently doing? Can you elaborate on why it might not be a good fit? I'm honestly just trying to learn from your experience, not disputing anything.
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dsulli 5464 days ago
Sure - no problem - the application is Generic Domain Finder - just search it on Google. The current app in the search results is still running GAE.

The things I loved: - tight integration with Google accounts - easy integration with other Google apis (we used a few)

The frustrating thing was dealing with the black box. We used an api to get domain availability. Every time it returns more slowly than the equivalent call on our linux based cloud server.

With GAE, you're basically stuck with what you get. With a generic Linux based cloud server - you have more room to optimize your environment, or even take your code and run it anywhere... AWS, Rackspace, Voxel...

I still believe in what GAE is trying to do - and I'll definitely try it out again for future projects.

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