As soon as I figured out how to invoke my app as a Backends app, my log messages stopped appearing.
I found this helpful post which says the Backends logs are kept separately and that I need to switch to Backends view by selecting the named backend from the dropdown at the top of the admin console, but I don’t see anything Backends specific in that list to select.
Perhaps this is a clue… when I invoke my app via myapp.appspot.com/dostuff, in the log I see I’m getting the DeadlineExceededError after 60 secs, indicating it’s not running as a Backends app. But when I invoke it via mybackend.myapp.appspot.com/dostuff, it continues running as needed, but no log entries!
Seems like I’m missing something. Thanks.
Somehow my app wasn’t fully recognized by GAE as a Backend app. And therefore my backend instances weren’t available in the drop-list. Seeing that others had similar trouble with a Python 2.7 app (ex.) that had been initially uploaded as a 2.5 app, I created a new app in GAE and uploaded to there and it worked. Sorry I don’t have a more definitive answer.
Before all was working well, I also ended up creating an empty /_ah/start handler as suggested by someone in this thread. Also if you’re deploying a multi-threaded backend, make sure to check this post out — there’s some important stuff I didn’t run across in the docs.