App Engine is great if you design your app within its limitation. It's just a different architecture to work with.
I haven't found the cold start or 30-second limit a problem yet. I have a cron job running periodically hitting the app to schedule tasks, that seems to always keep an instance running. The tasks were designed to do small things and finished in a short time. That actually helps to spread the tasks to more machines.
It does seem App Engine is running faster in the last week or so; it was kind of slow before. The new Play Back feature in my app http://www.previouslook.com actually works without much hiccup now.
I haven't found the cold start or 30-second limit a problem yet. I have a cron job running periodically hitting the app to schedule tasks, that seems to always keep an instance running. The tasks were designed to do small things and finished in a short time. That actually helps to spread the tasks to more machines.
It does seem App Engine is running faster in the last week or so; it was kind of slow before. The new Play Back feature in my app http://www.previouslook.com actually works without much hiccup now.