Synchronize Memcache and Datastore on Google App Engine

Question

I'm writing a chat application using Google App Engine. I would like chats to be logged. Unfortunately, the Google App Engine datastore only lets you write to it once per second. To get around this limitation, I was thinking of using a memcache to buffer writes. In order to ensure that no data is lost, I need to periodically push the data from the memcache into the data store.

Is there any way to schedule jobs like this on Google App. Engine? Or am I going about this in entirely the wrong way?

I'm using the Python version of the API, so a Python solution would be preferred, but I know Java well enough that I could translate a Java solution into Python.

Answer 1

Why not use a pull task? I highly recommend this Google video is you are not familiar enough with task queues. First 15 minutes will cover pull queue info that may apply to your situation. Anything involving per message updates may get quite expensive re: database ops, and this will be greatly exacerbated if you have any indices involved. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM0ZPO7-lcE&feature=player_embedded

I would simply set up my chat entity when users initiate it in the on-line handler, passing back the entity id to the chat parties. Send the id+message to your pull queue, and serialize the messages within the chat entity's TextProperty. You wont likely schedule the pull queue cron more often than once per second, so that avoids your entity update limitation. Most importantly: your database ops will be greatly reduced.

Answer 2

Sounds like the wrong way since you are risking losing data on memcache.

You can write to one entity group once per second.

You can write separate entity groups very rapidly. So it really depends how you structure your data. For example, if you kept an entire chat in one entity, you can only write that chat once per second. And you'd be limited to 1MB.

You should write a separate entity per message in the chat, you can write very, very quickly, but you need to devise a way to pull all the messages together, in order for the log.

Edit I agree with Peter Knego that the costs of using one entity per message will get way too expensive. His backend suggestion is pretty good too, although if your app is popular, backends don't scale that well.

I was trying to avoid sharding, but I think it will be necessary. If you're not familiar with sharding, read up on this: https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_counters

Sharding would be an intermediate between writing one entity for all messages in a conversation, vs one entity per message. You would randomly split the messages between a number of entities. For example, if you save the messages in 3 entities, you can write 5x/sec (I doubt most human conversations would go any faster than that).

On fetching, you would need to grab the 3 entities, and merge the messages in chronological order. This would save you a lot on cost. But you would need to write the code to do the merging.

One other benefit is that your conversation limit would now be 3MB instead of 1MB.

Answer 3

i think you would be fine by using the chat session as entity group and save the chat messages .
this once per second limit is not the reality, you can update/save at a higher rate and im doing it all the time and i don't have any problem with it. memcache is volatile and is the wrong choice for what you want to do. if you start encountering issues with the write rate you can start setting up tasks to save the data.

Answer 4

I think you could create tasks which will persist the data. This has the advantage that, unlike memcached the tasks are persisted and so no chats would be lost.

when a new chat comes in, create a task to save the chat data. In the task handler do the persist. You could either configure the task queue to pull at 1 per second (or slightly slower) and save each bit of chat data held in the task persist the incoming chats in a temporary table (in different entity groups), and every have the tasks pull all unsaved chats from the temporary table, persist them to the chat entity then remove them from the temporary table.

Answer 5

To get around the write/update limit of entity groups (note that entities without parent are their own entity group) you could create a new entity for every chat message and keep a property in them that would reference a chat they belong to.

You'd then find all chat messages that belong to a chat via a query. But this would be very inefficient, as you'd then need to do a query for every user for every new message.

So go with the above advice, but additionally do:

1. Look into backends. This are always-on instances where you could aggregate chat messages in memory (and immediately/periodically flush them to datastore). When user requests latest chat messages, you already have them in memory and would serve them instantly (saving on time and cost compared to using Datastore). Note that backends are not 100% reliable, they might go down from time to time - adjust chat message flushing to datastore accordingly.

2. Check out Channels API. This will allow you to notify users when there is a new chat message. This way you'd avoid polling for new chat messages and keep the number or requests down.