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I have been trying to build a web application using Google App Engine, but am finding it slow going. A major problem is GAE's many limits, both architectural and quantitative. Not knowing the system well, I design a solution, implement it, and then find it won't work in production because of some heretofore unsuspected limit.

Is there a resource that collects all of GAE's limits on one web page? I could see it being divided into subsections, like "Datastore," "Memcache," "Response times," "Blobstore," etc. Stackoverflow shows a multitude of questions about GAE limits.


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Which limits are you running in to? I can try help you get around them if you provide a bit more info. In the meantime, the app engine quota page may be of use -> developers.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas –  Gwyn Howell Aug 8 '13 at 10:21
Thank you, but it's not one or even a few specific limits. It's trying to understand the total universe of limits before designing a solution. –  Iron Pillow Aug 10 '13 at 22:54
They should also point out what is a soft limit and what is a hard limit. In addition, what process to follow to increase the limits. –  JE42 Nov 19 '13 at 7:09
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Google's App Engine dashboard has all the limit showing under quota details. But most of this limits are soft limits which you can send them a request to increase when you reach it, it's just there to avoid abuse/spam. Also note that these limits are increased when you enable billing.

But if you are talking about limitations like request size, request timeout and limits with datastore these are all because it is designed so it will scale seamlessly without degrading the performance if you have 10 users to 10 billion users.

It also took me few weeks to really get the hang of it and now even at my work(not using app engine) I try to do it the app engine way, like trying to limit a lot of things to avoid anything that will cause a degradation of the system. So this limitations are also learning curve on what you can do on other systems that don't put this kind of limitation to make your app scale.

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I understand why GAE imposes the limits, and I understand there is a learning curve, and I understand that GAE beats the programmer into architecting systems the GAE way. But I think the learning curve is unreasonable as is, because the limitations (request size, etc.) are spread through out the documentation. This makes architecting error-prone. Even after reading Sanderson's book I'd get fooled sometimes. So I'd really like to see everything on one page, so I know where the boundaries are, before I start figuring out how to stay within the boundaries. –  Iron Pillow Aug 8 '13 at 20:10
There are limits which only show up on the dashboard when you exceed them, and there are also hard limits which you cannot exceed. For example, there are these two limits, 'File Call Count' and 'File Bytes Sent', which are undocumented and hard, billing enabled or not. –  Nick Aug 9 '13 at 7:48
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