Can you illuminate that a little? Among the competitors, GAE appears to be among the lowest cost platforms. I'm sure there's certain types of applications that can cause it to become expensive, but I'm not sure I can predict well enough what those are.
At a high load (50+ requests/sec), we saw database timeouts tens of times per minute, and often more (every request in a 10-60 sec period would fail).
That's not a terribly high load by any modern standard, you can easily service that on one or two fairly commodity machines these days.
Assuming the point of GAE is scalability, this issue didn't make any sense to me. One would assume that Google would simply load balance requests out to replicated instances of your app and that those apps would in turn access Google's vaunted super scalable data services. Thousands of requests a second shouldn't even phase it.
I've noticed that response times can be highly variable, but so far (we're pre-launch) I haven't noticed anything just simply not getting returned or the kinds of slowness he's describing. Without more detail, something else must be going on here.
