What I like about App Engine traffic patterns.

I host SimpleText.ws on Google’s App Engine hosting service. The above graph shows me one of my favorite features of the service. The top graph is traffic. The bottom graph is average response time. You can see in the top graph that SimpleText.ws just got a traffic spike.

But the bottom graph is what I like. The more traffic I get, the more stable and fast the response times get. This is because Google does a number of things to minimize resource usage on low traffic sites, and that can lead to “slow” times for initial requests if the site hasn’t been getting much traffic.

Of course a sane person might argue that the response times should just be fast and stable all of the time. But I kind like it this way. The normal “slow” times are already good enough. But I like the phycological boost that I get when I quick check to make sure that everything’s working after a traffic spike, and find that it’s not only working, but working better then ever before.