IssueTracker

Almost all work in gae is performed by handling HTTP requests. The requests can execute for a limited amount of time and then they time out. At the time of filing of this issue the web request timeout is 30 seconds and the task queue request is 10 minutes. I suggest a simple API that when called returns how many more seconds remain before the request times out. I have prototyped this with task queue requests and found it very useful when I have thousands of subsecond work items.

while (self.seconds_to_timeout() > 5):
           if work:
                  do subsecond work
           else:
                   return
schedule task again