
Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/help-gmail-is-slow/
======
shaddi
I keep seeing this come up. I don't think Gmail has ever been noticeably
"slow" for me. Which leaves me wondering, what do people mean when they say
"Gmail is slow"? Searches take a long time? Delays in sending/receiving mail?
Unresponsive UI? Would appreciate some clarification from someone who has this
issue.

~~~
rfrey
For me, it manifests as clicking a label and seeing the "loading" element
appear at the top for 5-8 seconds before the contents of my <ahem> folder
appear. It's never been a problem for me before this September, but now it's
pretty consistent during business hours.

~~~
cma
With 200,000 android handsets activated per day (a pretty large chunk probably
never had a google account prior), I would expect them to have started having
issues.

~~~
joshfinnie
That is a great point. GMail has always been our little secret, but now that
android requires one (I think), the userbase is exploding. I am wondering if
Google was ill-prepared for this onslaught, never thinking that the popularity
of android directly correlates with the popularity of GMail!

------
losvedir
Well, looks like he's well on his way to a resolution. After Gabriel Weinberg
wrote a popular blog post[1] about how slow his Gmail had become, it was
fixed[2]. Now if only there was a way to fix these things without complaining
about it to thousands of people...

[1] [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has-
become...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has-become-
unsuably-slow.html) [2] [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail-
is-fast...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail-is-fast-
again.html)

------
sdrinf
Empirically:
[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cm...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cmpt=q)

Statistically: <http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+slow>

Personally: browsing from London, UK, mail.google.com resolves to 66.249.92.83
(New york - NY), speed is inversely correlating with standard net usage
(extremely slow at day, somewhat faster in the night). Currently, (1am,
GMT+0), measured by stopwatch: (they make you code faster :P )

login: 3 sec (firebug says the last asset has finished loading 8 sec in)

search: 8 sec

search within label: 3 sec

which is by my experience the fastest I've seen it for months. Furthermore,
performance does NOT change with the ?labs=0 param, albeit it becomes fast
again (~1.5 second searches) in basic HTML mode. Try that before considering
switching to a desktop client.

This is by no means within acceptable bounds. At this point in technology,
there is no reason whatsoever for any e-mail provider not to perform at sub-
second action level. What's even less acceptable, is Google's approach of
sorting resolution by descending popularity. If hell-raising becomes a
necessary pre-requirement of sorting this out, we ought to raise hell
collectively.

Sort that.

~~~
danhak
um...the trends in both of those data sets can be attributed to increasing
market share/user base of Gmail over that time.

------
davegan
I found it unusably slow way back in July, back around when Gabriel Weinberg
complained about it.

So I filled out the contact form that they had set up for it:
[http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=g...](http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=gtag_slowloading)

They never got back to me, but within a day I was running at full speed again.
Good thing, as I was about to move to desktop email application. Based on the
contact form, it would appear they DO know about the problem but at just not
publicizing what the issues are.

------
zavulon
I am also experiencing these issues. I've heard this issue is usually limited
to big and/or old accounts. I've had my Google account since it was in Beta,
and it's 48% filled.

Gmail has been so unbearably slow for me that it forced me to switch from
Firefox to Chrome on a Mac. In Chrome, it's much better, but still very slow.

In fact, I just got Office 2011 and trying out Outlook.. I've used to be a
devoted Outlook user before I switched to a Mac and went 100% Gmail for all my
personal & professional mail. But Outlook 2011 for OS X seems awesome so far,
so maybe this will be the end for my Gmail experience.

------
jaspero
I have started to feel that Gmail is getting bloated with features. I want my
mail to be simple and lightning fast.

~~~
noarchy
I'm with you on that. One of the things that made me switch to Google's search
engine back in the day was that it's page was free of garbage and bloat
(versus Yahoo and MSN, in particular). I'd hate to see Gmail get lost in
bloat.

------
jmm
I was perplexed for a second and thought MG had discovered nested tweets, but
actually it looks like it was just too much to ask him to take screen shots
consistently.

~~~
Raphael
Someone ought to show him the wonders of embedding.
<http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/>

------
boredguy8
Keep in mind, you can access Gmail via IMAP. There's a difference between
Gmail Web Viewer issues and Gmail as a mail service. I haven't yet had a
problem with Gmail as a mail server.

At our school, we've had by-and-large great responsiveness when addressing
specific issues with the Google Apps team. There's definitely a deep buffer
between support staff and engineers, but Google also has some of the most
knowledgeable support staff at a "tier 1" level that I've worked with. They're
also working with people who literally switched to Gmail because their mail
servers crashed and the schools had no way to bring mail back. This becomes
frustrating sometimes when you have to wait for the mail to bounce back from
the proper person when You've demonstrated competence in the area you're
trying to troubleshoot. (The year prior to moving students to Gmail, we
actually had a higher uptime when scheduled downtime is excluded.)

It is hard to pin down the recent slowness issues. The most easily repeatable
issue is domain-based contact 'auto-complete' went from taking seconds (3s-5s)
to sometimes completely timing out. Also, the Google Chat connector recently
seems to be losing connection more regularly. It hasn't been bad enough to
create a ticket, but we do have a conference call Monday.

As far as free, non-apps usage: I hate to pull the "what do you expect for
'free', but, well, what do you? I get more transparency and uptime from Gmail
than I had when I was on Yahoo! Mail (not sure if that's still the case).

~~~
kamechan
i use their imap server as well and rarely, if ever, log into the gmail
interface. it's nice to know it's there if i'm on the road and without a phone
and using someone else's computer. but generally the performance on imap has
been great.

another benefit is that most of the time when the rest of the world is
complaining that they can't access gmail from the website, mine access is just
fine.

of course, if everyone sets their accounts up as imap this may no longer be
the case, though i'm thinking that imap is likely a lot thinner of a protocol
than what they gave going on with their web ui.

------
epochwolf
One more reason I use imap to access the various gmail accounts I have.

------
clofresh
Does anyone know any good alternatives to Gmail? I briefly looked to switch
back when they released Buzz, but there aren't any good competitors that match
Gmail's ease of use, spam protection, and (previous) speed. Seems like it'd be
a good opportunity for young, hungry startup. I think I'd pay $3-5 a month for
a really solid email service.

------
jewbacca
Sometime earlier this fall, Google Maps became suddenly and totally unusable
for me (Firefox, OS X). Whole-system stuttering. Strange thing is, only in the
main Google interface to Maps (ie, searching from maps.google.com) -- embedded
maps are fine, even full-window ones like on padmapper. And only in Firefox.

------
noarchy
My regular Gmail accounts seem unaffected by this problem, even with three
accounts logged in at once. On the other hand, my email that is tied into
Google Apps is definitely slow. Initial loading is slow, and then there can be
some delays when actually reading mail.

------
heyjonboy
Based on a personal experience, it seems to be some sort of data fragmentation
problem.

I had similar problems with Gmail a few weeks ago - sending a message would
take ~30 seconds, accessing labels took up to a minute, messages were
appearing in the inbox 30 minutes after they arrived, etc. The slowness
persisted for about a week.

2 weeks ago my account went down for about 10 minutes. Accessing
mail.google.com while logged into my Gmail account would return a 503 error;
my backup Gmail account, which had now slowness, was accessible. 10 minutes
later, I was able to access my account and the slowness was gone.

My guess is that Gmail took my account offline while my messages were re-
indexed.

------
dkasper
Anecdotally, I remember other people complaining about this a few months ago,
and Google was able to flip some kind of switch and make it "fast" again. Not
sure what they did, but Gmail has different scalability issues than Google
because with the web it's fine if there's some latency between when a site
changes its content and when Google indexes it. In fact it's expected which is
one of the reasons why people put so much time into SEO. With Gmail you expect
all of your data to be instantly searchable as soon as it hits your inbox.
Compound that with the fact that everyone has their own private inbox which is
exclusive of everyone else's and you can see where it's a hard problem to
basically build you a personal Google with real time search capabilities.

All that being said, I wish Google would hurry up and solve the problem!

------
tim-robinson
I heard this many months ago, when gmail was still super fast for me, but now
it really has hit me. It's not just gmail either, it's also affecting google
groups too. It's all been pretty sucky for at least a month now.

[edit] Google groups is probably using the same backbone as gmail, I'd
imagine.

------
xal
Gmail recently restricted how many sessions they allow to a given account. I'm
not sure what the technical details are here. I often have tons of tabs open
and many of them have gmail in them. If gmail becomes unresponsive, say after
sending something, the window will hang in perpetual loading state until I go
hunt for other gmail tabs and close them.

Also I definitely don't experience the long initial loading times, could this
be correlated with the amount of emails in the inbox? I currently have ~100
there and it loads in a second.

------
DrStalker
We use the purchased version of Google Apps, and while it is slightly better
than the free gmail we still get a lot of slow searches on the web interface
or instances of "unable to load conversation" when trying to view mail.

One of the greatest selling points of Google Apps for us is having all
previous mail archived and search-able so this is somewhat disappointing, but
the total search time + time spent retrying is still less than the total
search time would be using 10GB of mail in Outlook.

------
83457
Started looking at AppEngine last week for some projects. The day I wanted to
look at getting started info and documentation it was down for a couple hours.
A few days later I go to sign up and that process is throwing an error for an
hour. Is that unusual? Didn't exactly make me feel confident in relying on
them.

~~~
gte910h
Honestly sign ups are the crappiest part of GAE. It is smooth as a breeze
after that.

------
kin
The article mentions nothing about labs. Personally, my experience with Gmail
has been slower with every new lab feature I enable, which makes sense. Most
of these labs are in beta. Disabling all lab features speeds Gmail
dramatically for me, particularly load time. But, that's just my personal
experience.

~~~
pyre
Around September I started noticing slowdowns and timeouts, and I haven't
added any new lab features. Either Google is running into scaling issues, or
they upgraded something (front or back-end) that was a regression as far as
performance is concerned.

------
bryne
I just enable the app in Labs that puts the "Beta" tag back on the Gmail logo
and my anger instantly subsides!

------
smackfu
The one that drives me crazy is when I do something and then close the GMail
tab and it tells me that an operation is in progress. By the time I see and
read the message, I'm sure the operation is finished, so what option am I
supposed to choose?

------
daniel_iversen
wow, I thought I was the only one ;)

I heard that if you have certain enti-virus shields on (the ones that parses
all sorts of network and HTTP traffic then it can cause this, but even with
disabling it its slow.

It sucks because GMail is really the hottest thing since sliced bread.

Could Google finally have found a scalability problem they can't solve without
it costing (comparatively) too much?

....and those graphs on <http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+slow> would be
misleading because all they show is that more people are using GMail ;)

------
crazydiamond
I have a similar issue with google itself. on many days google.com just hangs.
If i try google.co.in (India), i get instant response. However, my vimperator
resolves "g" to google.com so I have to keep facing the hang.

~~~
pyre
Maybe due to the extra traffic that comes with something like Google Instant
Search?

------
DifE-Q
I experienced this at home and at work.I deleted my Mozilla directory (after
backing up my bookmarks, etc.) and that cleared the speed problem up for me on
both machines.

------
rue
Processing all your pseudo-private information takes a lot of cycles. Multiply
by millions of users at peak times. Lots of private information, lots of
sluggishness.

~~~
ceejayoz
It's not as if they've had a massive influx of new users, though. It happened
suddenly a few weeks ago to me.

------
andreshb
Use HTML view for very fast performance. Also gmail/google apps on the iPad is
crazy fast too. Otherwise it's very very slow. Maybe its a JS issue?

~~~
pyre
Why all of the sudden? Upgrade regression?

------
drcode
I concur it has been weirdly slow for a few weeks now.

------
wholypoly
I also had the problem. I think it is because of one of the google labs
features. Since disabling them, I don't have the problem anymore.

------
anto1ne
it was already slow 6 months ago, so I created a new account. Now it's slow
again, even worse than 6 months ago. Glad to see I'm not alone, but
considering it's free, I think we can't really complain, however I'm
considering yahoo mail, I've heard a lot of good things about it. Anyone using
yahoo ?

------
dnsworks
Hey TechCrunch, Penny-Arcade called and they want their burn back.

------
chrismsnz
Coming from the site with a 20-second page load :\

