Question

When I get a GET request from a user, I send them the response and then spend maybe a second logging stuff about that request. Is there a way to close the connection when I have the response ready, but continue doing that logging part, so that the user wouldn’t have to wait for it to complete?

Answer 1

From the Google App Engine docs for the Response object:

App Engine does not support sending
data to the user’s browser before
exiting the handler. Some web servers
use this technique to “stream” data to
the user’s browser over a period of
time in response to a single request.
App Engine does not support this
streaming technique.

So there’s no easy way. If you have a bundle of data that you can pass to a longer-running “process and log” method, try using the deferred library. Note that this will requiring bundling your data up and sending it to the task queue to do your processing and logging, so

1. you may not save much time, and
2. the results may not look much like you’d want – for example, you’d be logging from a different request, so might need to radically alter the logging

Still, you could try.