Google AppEngine Quota Throttling ... Annoyance

Disclaimer: I still have a special place in my heart for the big G. Having said that...

Folks at Bluepulse are ardent fans of Google Apps and Google AppEngine. On the latter, the team recently ran into the quota/throttling issue (described at length by Aral Balkan and others). Aral makes a number of points, not all of which I agree with (e.g., that Quotas are a Bad Idea [in general?]).

But the most valid point is against the rather crazy idea of "intelligent" throttling, where, simply put, your app is cut off at peak demand (in an effort to spread your quota over the entire day).

As others have pointed out, this isn't very intelligent. There is significant benefit loss in not being able to serve your audience when they're most interested. On the cost side, it's not even necessary. Indeed it is arguably desirable to allow apps to consume resources at their own peaks. With the varied and global nature of app distribution, the demand on AppEngine's computing resources will just smooth things out. With a sufficiently global timezone distribution, peak-to-trough demand ratio will be 2:1 at most.

Practically speaking, though, the gap isn't so big. It comes down to the numerical difference between the daily limit and the maximum-rate limit. Right now it's about 8:1 for the free apps, and about 35:1 for the billable apps. Individual apps, especially in their early days, can easily surpass the 8:1 peak-to-trough ratio implicit in these limits.

So, outside of the "it's-free-so-what-do-you-expect" zone, I think the AppEngine team should lift the max limit for the free apps to something closer to 20:1. Let them run out of the daily limit at their own peril.

I suspect there would be a lot of happier developers in the AppEngine community. End users will run into throttling limits much less often. And happier free app owners are probably more likely to convert to happy billable app owners.

Make peace.