Google App Engine And Comet?
by Dylan SchiemannApril 11th, 2008
Dion Almaer’s post about App Engine with Ruby, Python, and Perl led us to ask the natural question we ask around here: “What about Comet?”
The short answer is, not yet really, based on this little bit from the App Engine documentation:
Some features impose limits unrelated to quotas to protect the stability of the system. For example, when an application is called to serve a web request, it must issue a response within a few seconds. If the application takes too long, the process is terminated and the server returns an error code to the user. The request timeout is dynamic, and may be shortened if a request handler reaches its timeout frequently to conserve resources.
For those hoping to build the first hot Comet App Engine App, you’ll have to wait. Per Dion: “Remember guys…. this is just the beginning.”
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April 11th, 2008 at 1:30 am
How long is a few seconds? Doesn’t this mean that you can’t upload images or other large files to an application with a slow connection?
will it be possible with a workaround? Like spawning another comet thread before the few seconds have ended or something like that?
/P
April 11th, 2008 at 11:52 am
I wonder if they consider SSE or multipart as “[issuing] a response within a few seconds”
December 13th, 2008 at 8:40 am
For anyone who wants to see comet functionality in google app engine there is an open issue for it. Go there and star it to show interest:
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=377
August 7th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
According to an App Engine blog post on Feb 12, 2009, “Response deadline raised to 30 seconds. The amount of time an App Engine app can take to respond to an incoming request has been raised from 10 to 30 seconds!”
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/02/skys-almost-limit-high-cpu-is-no-more.html
I wonder if that is still true.