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Comment by yatsyk | Hacker News Reader

GitHub pages[1] is other great option for static site hosting. You are pushing to github repo and your site is regenerating. Jekyll [2] is used as static site generator. I'm using GH Pages for HNresources.com hosting. If I need quickly update site I could change source page on project page on github.com site without even using git.

One question according to GAE hosting: If your application wasn't requested for some time it is unloaded from memory and first request after that require more time. Is it still apply to static sites?

* [1] http://pages.github.com/

* [2] https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

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(I am not on the App Engine team, but researched it recently to give a talk about it)

If the request is going through a static handler (as declared in app.yaml), then the request won't go to the Apps frontend servers at all, it will go to the static file servers. So, no, the app unloading shouldn't be relevant for static files.

I made this diagram for a recent talk that somewhat shows that: http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/writing-apps-the-googley-...

EDIT: It looks like DryDrop may actually use script handlers, not static handlers, in the app.yaml, so app unloading would apply.

[deleted] wrong thread

Thanks for the link to the talk. Interesting stuff! :D

I'm the author of DryDrop. I've created it before GitHub pages were announced. Then I switched to GitHub Pages+Jekyll and quite ironically, DryDrop site itself is hosted from GH pages :-)

But still I think DryDrop may be useful for some folks who want to use GAE for hosting. See the FAQ on http://drydrop.binaryage.com/#faq

> you have a public repo, you don't want to pay for CNAME support on GitHub and you are obsessed with the idea of running your site on GAE :-)

You don't need to pay anything for CNAME support now. It was not true previously but now only "obsessed with the idea of running your site on GAE" reason remains.

Since GAE isn't static-site aware (at least not that I'm familiar with), I'm assuming the application will be unloaded. :)

Application will be unloaded from memory for sure but to serve static file you don't need to initialize app (i.e. load jar file into memory and start it or parse python source), you just need to serve static file. So start-up time could be much better. It is interesting to know about actual experience on GAE for static files hosting.

According to GH pages performance is great.

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