DeadlineExceededError is a really stupid problem in App Engine and the simplest fix would be to just kill the instance after such an error and start a new one. Google doesn't want to do that because it wastes resources. So, the current solution is to write Python modules which, when they're imported, will work correctly even if the execution stops in the middle of the module and then is restarted from the beginning (i.e., when a new request is received).

It's possible that with the upcoming pre-warming requests this bug will disappear in practice because your whole project gets a chance to import and initialize all modules before the first request is received. If these pre-warming requests don't have a 30s timeout your instance will always have enough time to finish the initialization in a non-broken state.

Anyway, it's your own mistake if you stay with the Django helper. The bug can be worked around. It's fixed in Django-nonrel. I still see people who try to use the helper for mission-critical projects. Don't do that. The helper is buggy. It uses monkey-patches all over the place. This makes it extremely vulnerable to bugs caused by DeadlineExceededError. Just use Django-nonrel, even if you only want to use App Engine's models.