Thanks for the detail - pretty comfortable with the ins and outs of
the task queue - any ideas about the 5 task limit?

> Also, don't confuse transactional tasks with the task queue. Transactional
> tasks are the those that will all happen simultaneously or will graciously
> fail without any partial commits. Due to the implementation details you
> probably want to avoid intentionally doing lots of transaction updates on
> the same few objects, since it is possible (if you are kicking lots of
> simultaneous jobs off with the task queue) to shoot yourself in the foot and
> have a very small success rate.

I wasn't confused until I read this paragraph :) Transactional tasks
do not need to operate on the same entity group as the transaction in
which they are raised - this is one of their greatest strengths. They
are fast to raise, so you can actually include quite a lot of work in
a 'transaction' of this sort, all done in parallel.  Generally if I
want to do something in the same entity group as the originating
transaction, I would do it right there in the transaction and not
raise a task.  So at least for me (and I expect for many others),
transactional tasks are almost exclusively *not* operating on the same
entity group as the transaction in which they are raised, unless
perhaps they are being used in a continuation style bulk update, in
which case they are likely to be in series and not cause contention.

Anyway, question still there :) Is the 5 task limit a restriction that
is expected to remain indefinitely? Can I get around the restriction
by raising more in a single batch API call - i.e. is it a restriction
on API calls or actual tasks? Cheers,

Colin

On Jul 7, 4:46 pm, Nate Bauernfeind <[email protected]>
wrote:
> I have noticed that batch datastore calls run within a single transaction.
> The maximum number of entities that can be added or deleted (and probably
> modified, though I have not tried) was 500. I'm betting you could probably
> wrap them around a single transaction. Though, from my experience, I
> wouldn't really recommend doing this (since trying to commit two batches of
> 500 to the datastore within the same call tended to time out for me).
>
> Also, don't confuse transactional tasks with the task queue. Transactional
> tasks are the those that will all happen simultaneously or will graciously
> fail without any partial commits. Due to the implementation details you
> probably want to avoid intentionally doing lots of transaction updates on
> the same few objects, since it is possible (if you are kicking lots of
> simultaneous jobs off with the task queue) to shoot yourself in the foot and
> have a very small success rate.
>
> Transactions work with the task queue in such a way that the task will only
> be added to the queue if no other piece of your commits fail. For example,
> you wouldn't really want your app to run the "new user" code if you couldn't
> create the new user account for that user because someone else registered
> that user name at the same time. I.E. Things on the task queue do not
> continue running within the same transaction if they were created within
> one.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 4:22 AM, hawkett <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> >   This page -
> >http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/transactions.html
> > - says that we cannot raise more than 5 transactional tasks in a
> > single transaction, and I wanted to check if this was a limit that you
> > were hoping to raise, or if this is likely to be a long term
> > restriction?  Does this restriction limit API calls to the task queue
> > or actual number of tasks -  e.g. could I raise more than 5 by doing
> > them in batch with a single call to the task queue API? Cheers,
>
> > Colin
>
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