Added precompilation-enabled to AppEngine plugin

In the 1.2.8 version of the AppEngine SDK there is an option to precompile your solution as you deploy it to the AppEngine. Apparently precompilation can save up to 30% runtime on loading requests.

I added the option to turn on the precompilation-enabled setting in appengine-web.xml to the AppEngine plug-in this morning. Hopefully I can submit a patch with change, I’ll get back to that in a bit.

As I’m writing this I’m deploying to AppEngine for the first time. What happens is that during the deployment to Google AppEngine, the appcfg.cmd compiles the solution locally.

Showing the following lines in the input:

37% Cloned 600 files. 40% Uploading 4 files. 52% Uploaded 1 files. 61% Uploaded 2 files. 68% Uploaded 3 files. 73% Uploaded 4 files. 77% Precompiling. 80% Precompiling. 174 files left. 82% Precompiling. 94 files left. 84% Precompiling. 22 files left. 90% Deploying new version.

Now it’s deployed, I’m going to let it run for a while while I fix something else.

I have Pingdom set up for checking the AppEngine project every minute. That way I can see the changes in response time, and from the dashboard I can see if the CPU use goes down.

As far as I can tell, the precompilation doesn’t help with the timeout issues when starting a grails application hosted on AppEngine, it might help, but it doesn’t affect the loading time noticeably. However I for one am going to have my application precompiled.