Difference between Http loading flag true and false

Question

We got stackdriver monitoring set up on our GCP environments. And we are struggling with loading=false and loading=true on HTTP response metrics. Responses marked with 'loading=true' flag have much higher latency. What is the difference between 'true' and 'false'?

The only description available in docs: "loading: (BOOL) Indicates whether the request was loading".

Answer 1

You didn't specify for which kind of resource these metrics were reported but I suspect you may be using App Engine. Correct me if I'm wrong.

In this context, a loading request is the first request that hit a newly created instance. The instance then needs to load dependencies, set configuration etc... before it can actually process the request and respond to it, which makes the response time bigger. You'll find more details about loading requests here .