As I understand it, the process of performing a single fetch (call to
get()) from the dastastore using a key basically involves finding the host
housing the entity, opening a socket, fetching the data, and then cleaning
up the connection. So to fetch something like 30 entities from the
datastore, you're repeating the process 30 times over in serial, each time
incurring whatever overhead is involved. I also read that if you perform
bulk fetches, (ie passing multiple keys at once) you can eliminate a great
deal of that overhead. In one of the videos I watched from Google I/0 2009,
the presenter (whose name I forget - d'oh) said that performing a bulk fetch
actually performs the fetches in parallel from the data store and you shoudl
see requests noticeably faster.