For about ten minutes the practice page has been unusable due to repeated server errors. The forum's also failing intermittently.

App Engine having a party again today [sigh]:
http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/serving/2010/09/14#ae-trust-detail-helloworld-get-latency

I'll credit your account a day for the poor service.

Thanks! You can't credit me just a couple of hours, eh?

These server errors are getting annoying. Did you guys ever talk about what if they continue?

Increasing pressure on the App Engine team from all the other App Engine apps until they improve the situation, is all that's likely to happen. We're not going to move it.

I wasn't able to access the site at all, .com or .cn, sometime late evening yesterday here in China. Is that the same downtime you're talking about James? Do App Engine failures cause the entire site to fail like that, or just certain sections of it like the actual app?

You can check App Engine status here. Looks green.

http://code.google.com/status/appengine

James

Speaking of errors, the .com domain hasn't been working properly for me all day. It could be a cache thing, but has anybody else had this issue?

I had a few minor errors on it. It was only over the course of an hour or two, though. It wasn't a horribly big deal on my end.

FatDragon, I'm not sure what the problem is (systems seem good here), but I'll credit your account to make up for the lost time.

Meh, no need to credit my account - I'm happy to support the site, so I see my account being credited as almost counter-productive.

The downtime in my first post of this thread was probably the same as James mentioned, and it came after I had already put in one session with Skritter, so it wasn't a big deal. The front page oddness seems to have been a cache issue on my end, as a wholesale deletion of my browsing history cleared it up. So all told, no harm done.

More server errors yesterday and today. I noticed when I saw items coming up 2% due. ;( The JavaScript console is full of 500's.

James

A small update from the App Engine team on this one:
---------------------

As of 10am PST, November 2nd, 2010, we begin seeing elevated datastore
latency rates. Higher latency then caused a spike in
DeadlineExceededErrors across all App Engine applications. We quickly
determined this latency was being introduce by an ongoing upgrading to
a component of out infrastructure. After the upgrade was completed,
latencies did improve, but elevated error rates are still present.

As of 2:30pm PST, we are still seeing higher than average latencies
resulting in occasional errors. Investigation is continuing into the
cause and we will continue to update progress here.

- App Engine Team