I use the remote API for some utility tasks, and I've noticed that it is orders of magnitude slower than code running on Appengine. A simple get_by_id(list) took a couple of minutes using the remote API, and a couple of seconds running on Appengine.
The logs show that the remote API fetched separately taking a couple of seconds each; whereas on Appengine the whole list of objects is retrieved in about the same time.
Is there any way to improve this situation?
Don't forget that the remoteapi executes your code locally and only calls appengine servers for datastore/blobstore/etc. operations. So in essence, you're running code that's hitting a database living over the network. It's definitely slower.
Remote API is extremely slow