Whats going on with my App Engine frontend instance usage?

Question

Not sure if it's an update or something but I have have 2 F4 instances running on the standard environment(java app) at the moment.Now I haven't done one single request in the past 12hrs but my frontend instance usage is at 64.02hrs for today !! I thought the usage only increases when requests are being done. Did something change ? I'm still on the 1 year free tier(I have about 90 days left)

screenshot

Content of my config file :

<appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0">
  <runtime>java8</runtime>
  <threadsafe>true</threadsafe>
  <instance-class>F4</instance-class>
  <automatic-scaling>
    <min-instances>1</min-instances>
   <max-instances>3</max-instances>
   <min-idle-instances>1</min-idle-instances>
  </automatic-scaling>
  <env-variables>
    <env-var name="BUCKET_NAME" value="sydro_business_images" />
  </env-variables>
</appengine-web-app>

Can you share the contents of your app.yaml file? For this question they would be very useful as your settings may actually be affecting your billing as well as the way in which your instances are scaling. Also, maybe share the QPS in your application, so we can understand a bit better the behaviour. — rsalinas, Dec 04 '19 at 09:14

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 04 '19 at 16:03

I don't think it is the daily usage, I think it displays the total usage for the billing period.

First make sure you delete the previous versions that have been deployed.

Additionally, why are you constantly running instances if there is no traffic? Standard environment boots up new instances very quickly so you don't need keep any instances running. So I'd use these settings if you don't except much traffic:

  <automatic-scaling>
    <min-instances>0</min-instances>
    <max-instances>1</max-instances>
  </automatic-scaling>

See this answer for details.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 05 '19 at 10:15

0

The usage is instance hours based on a F1 instance, an F4 instance costs 4 F1 instances, so if you have 1 F4 instance running for the 12 hours, that will cost 48 instance hours.

You are correct that the usage increases when requests are made, but you also have min-instances set to 1, so you will always be charged for a min of 4 instance hours/hour with the F1 instance. You may want to change the min-instances to 0

answered Dec 05 '19 at 10:15

Craig

129
4

Just for info free tier provides to you 28 hours of F instance so: 12 * 4 - 28 – Mauro Nov 12 '21 at 13:33

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 05 '19 at 10:17

Based on your settings, it seems that you are most likely running multiple versions of App Engine, additionally, please keep in mind that as mentioned here, you are also billed for the idle instances which you have set.

I would suggest you to first of all make sure to stop or delete all your previous versions, as well as remove the idle instances in your app.yaml so that you have better control on the number of instances.

Additionally, if you are concerned regarding the expenses of App Engine you generate daily, I would recommend you to set up a spending limit which would allow you to stop App Engine in case you are exceeding certain usage parameters that you can assign.

Whats going on with my App Engine frontend instance usage?

3 Answers3