this tip can cut a few hundred milliseconds or more off of your cold start time.
Using JSPs slows you down in two ways:
If you have a file with a .jsp extension, anywhere in your website directory, appcfg will detect that you use JSP, and it will add 8 libraries that are used for processing JSPs into your lib directory before uploading to the app engine. These libraries total two megabytes in size, and simply having them in your lib directory slows your cold starts down by a few hundred milliseconds. If you are interested in what libraries these are, you can see them in the temporary folder appcfg creates while uploading your app.
The first JSP file accessed after a cold start, even an empty one, will take a few hundred additional milliseconds to be processed. I'm not sure what causes this, maybe it has to do with initializing the JSP processor.