<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Strom</author><text>$0.10 per 100k writes is just a way of them billing you. Sure it&apos;s a lot compared to your avarage HDD price, but the data is hosted on at least 3 datacenters at all times, running google&apos;s software stack &amp;#38; everything is being constantly monitored by Google&apos;s SRE team.&lt;p&gt;App Engine pricing might seem expensive if you try to do a simple table comparsion with alternatives, but when you get more deeply into it you&apos;ll find that a lot of stuff that is included in the service with GAE will cost you extra when you use the alternatives.</text><parent_chain><item><author>ajross</author><text>Reading the thread (I&apos;m curious about GAE, not an expert), it seems like the details aren&apos;t clear at all.  Neither the original poster nor the Google rep seem to have a clear idea of what I/O operations are being generated.&lt;p&gt;But this bit stood out: $0.10 per 100k writes.  That price seems to be far too high.  The poster is doing (something like) a reindex of 10M entries (that kind of data is pretty small really: it&apos;s the kind of database you might use as a test set on your laptop interactively). Figure each modification is atomic, and that the b-tree height of the storage is ~4.  So that&apos;s 40M writes to create an index, or $400!&lt;p&gt;Seriously?  Again, this is the kind of task you&apos;d expect to do quickly and interactively on your development box, and it costs a price of the same order as your day&apos;s salary (!) to execute in the cloud?&lt;p&gt;Looking at this from the perspective of the underlying I/O device: this index consumes just a tiny, tiny fraction of a hard disk drive&apos;s capacity.  Yet creating it costs enough to &lt;i&gt;buy the device&lt;/i&gt; several times over?&lt;p&gt;Something is wrong.  Is that a misquote or have I misunderstood?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>App Engine charges $6,500 to update a ListProperty on 14.1 million entities</title><url>http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/f85aa58e54ebb8ae#</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>magicalhobo</author><text>&amp;#62; So that&apos;s 40M writes to create an index, or $400!&lt;p&gt;At $0.10 per 100k writes, 40M would be $40.</text><parent_chain><item><author>ajross</author><text>Reading the thread (I&apos;m curious about GAE, not an expert), it seems like the details aren&apos;t clear at all.  Neither the original poster nor the Google rep seem to have a clear idea of what I/O operations are being generated.&lt;p&gt;But this bit stood out: $0.10 per 100k writes.  That price seems to be far too high.  The poster is doing (something like) a reindex of 10M entries (that kind of data is pretty small really: it&apos;s the kind of database you might use as a test set on your laptop interactively). Figure each modification is atomic, and that the b-tree height of the storage is ~4.  So that&apos;s 40M writes to create an index, or $400!&lt;p&gt;Seriously?  Again, this is the kind of task you&apos;d expect to do quickly and interactively on your development box, and it costs a price of the same order as your day&apos;s salary (!) to execute in the cloud?&lt;p&gt;Looking at this from the perspective of the underlying I/O device: this index consumes just a tiny, tiny fraction of a hard disk drive&apos;s capacity.  Yet creating it costs enough to &lt;i&gt;buy the device&lt;/i&gt; several times over?&lt;p&gt;Something is wrong.  Is that a misquote or have I misunderstood?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>App Engine charges $6,500 to update a ListProperty on 14.1 million entities</title><url>http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/f85aa58e54ebb8ae#</url></story>