For an App Engine app that is serving mostly static pages and images (a basic CMS), what kind of average QPS can I expect while remaining inside App Engine’s free quota?
I’m optimizing several small sites which are hosted on App Engine and which run out of quota at < 1 QPS. That is, they cannot sustain 1 QPS for more than about 6 hours without exhausting the daily free quota. I know how to optimize them, but I don’t know what QPS I should be expecting from the free quota. Is it fairly easy to get 1 QPS? 10? 100?
I realize there are a lot of variables that go into this, so I’d also be interested in knowing what people are actually achieving inside the free quota, and which quota they hit first. (I’m bumping into “Datastore Read Operations” and “Outgoing Bandwidth.” 1GB/day goes quickly when serving images.)
One yardstick that you could use is Google’s own claim in their FAQs that their free quota should allow for roughly 5 million pageviews a month for an efficient application, which would translate to a sustained and continuous 1.93 QPS.
Now, please keep in mind that this claim was made before Google made quite a drastic price change in September 2011, so the present condition might be different from what was being claimed.
Regarding bandwidth quota, take a look on edge caching, might be helpful.