While the Google App Engine (GAE) is a nice environment for developing and hosting Java web applications it has some constraints that should be considered during development. On the one hand, there are restrictions in the classes that can be used. GAE allows only a subset of the JavaSE classes to be used. This, however, is in my experience normally not a big issue. Even with this restriction it is possible to write good web applications.

Performance is another issue – and becomes more and more important. While GAE isn’t the highest performant environment anyway, it has some annoying characteristics that should be considered when developing web applications: the initial load request, also known as application cold start time. This is due to the fact that GAE instantiates a new VM for a web application if the application hasn’t been used for a while (the duration is not specified, but may be down to a couple of seconds). This instantiation takes some noticable time. Depending on the framework that is used by the application, it can take several seconds.

Per has a thorough analysis and provides some workarounds in the blog of his new project Small Improvements.