Question

I want to schedule a cron job on Google App Engine to view my 5 main pages every 10 minutes or so to keep a current instance up and running and to increase page speed for users. I understand all of the basic syntax for creating a cron job but I am curious what the python would look like for that. Do I simply need to make 5 different cron jobs and have each one fetch a URL?

Answer 1

To answer your specific question, such a cron.yaml could look like this:

cron:
- description: five minute run
  url: /refresh
  schedule: every 5 minutes

where /refresh is a handler you’ve written in your app that is then called even N minutes automatically.

E.G. myapplication.appspot.com/refresh

There’s no need to refresh a specific page or more than one. Just having the handler called will keep your app alive.

But as others have noted, this is a bit much to keep an app permanently warm.