Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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High Scalability recently posted a monster of an article with facts about how latency directly affects the bottom line of businesses on the Web, and best of all, plenty of advice on how websites can go about to reduce latency.

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Ping is the favorite tool of network administrators for testing connectivity and response time over networks, but is there a limit to how fast response times can get? Of course there is. The answer is c. Ultimately response time over a network is limited by the speed of light. In a vacuum, light travels with [...]

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