
Gmail as a Facade - hye
http://jackg.org/gmail-as-a-facade
======
leemhoffman
If your gmail is slow there is a simple and effective solution. I've had gmail
for years and actually pay for my google apps account. Like the author I
assumed my growing mailbox size and filters were the reason for the increasing
slowness. So I contacted support and after some investigation they noticed
that I had tons of polling requests that were slowing down my account from
connected apps (think greplin). They suggested I remove them. I was skeptical,
but I did. Immediately gmail was BLAZING fast again. If your gmail or google
apps is slow I highly recommend removing all connected apps ASAP:

<https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens>

~~~
hurstdog
I was coming to this page just to post a comment like yours above. Thanks for
doing that.

I work on the Gmail backend team and we regularly see blogs go by such as this
one. The vast majority of the times that prominent bloggers report slowness
it's because they do have tons of apps polling their account via IMAP or other
sync methods. All of these apps end up competing for resources to your account
with the web UI and thus you experience slowness.

Internally we have accounts with upwards of 100G of mail still being very
usable, so we know Gmail scales. Also we have quite a few people internally
focusing specifically on finding and fixing these types of problems so that
eventually it won't matter how many clients you have or how large your mailbox
is, but these things take time. Gmail is a huge ship, we can't turn on a dime.

So yeah, check that IssuedAuthSubTokens page and revoke access to any random
services that you've tried out and forgot about.

Hope that helps. -Andrew

~~~
zx2c4
Sorry, but this isn't the case for me. IssuedAuthSubTokens shows a google talk
authorization (bitlbee...), google calendar, and chrome.

But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely
unusable.

~~~
hurstdog
I'm sorry that trick isn't working for you. As you mention LKML causes
slowdown, it's possible that you're getting an inordinate amount of mail. It's
also possible you've got an agressive IMAP client that isn't using one of
those auth tokens (another common slowdown cause).

As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help
forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate
bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues.

Hope that helps,

-Andrew

* <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100>

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egypturnash
This is a complete tangent, but is anyone else getting tired of the growing
number of Svbtle blogs? They all blend together, with only the upper-left
image to tell them apart - and sticking them all into the same circle makes
those images all have the same silhouette.

The first appearance was cool, it was distinctive and unique. A breath of
fresh air, even. But now it seems like a third of the links I hit from HN are
Svbtlr blogs; it's starting to feel as generic and indistinguishable as last
year's Wordpress theme.

~~~
Jgrubb
'Scuse my tangent from your tangent, but this whole subtle [sic] thing seems
like the clubhouse for the cool kids. I don't like the cool kids. That's why
I'm here amongst my uncool peers reading and discussing pointedly uncool
topics.

~~~
jamesaguilar
But they too were once uncool, and it's hard to turn down exclusivity when
it's offered.

------
kevinconroy
Hmm, I don't doubt that the facade solution is working, but can't say that the
slowness is necessary systemic.

I have two Gmail accounts - 1 work email on Google Apps at 10GB, 1 personal on
normal Gmail at 3GB. Can't see any performance differences. Are others
experiencing this?

~~~
runako
> 1 work email on Google Apps at 10GB, 1 personal on normal Gmail at 3GB

My account experiences the slowness the OP describes:

\- Seconds to open a conversation, often punctuated with messages indicating
that the operation failed and must be retried.

\- Sending mails fails, and must be retried multiple times.

\- Delays correlate loosely with US workdays (I'm in the US). Performance is
consistently better at 1AM EST than at 2PM EST.

\- 0 connected apps.

I haven't done extensive comparison to other accounts, but I believe that the
number of messages is a cause of sluggishness. My mailboxes are > 120k
messages. This causes problems with many mail clients; for instance, Sparrow
(iPhone or OS X) is useless.

I'm surprised that the GMail team hasn't figured out how to handle busy mail
users, given the propaganda that all Google users use GMail. I'd love to have
the option to pay for Day 1 performance in my GMail boxes.

~~~
hurstdog
I have about 2.5 million emails in my work account and it still works really
well, as a counter example. (I work at Google, on Gmail backend).

If you've debugged it yourself and can't get to a good resolution (which it
looks like you have), please post in our help forums. There are a few people
that are dedicated to reading the forum and helping users, and when they hit
dead ends for various reasons they'll escalate to the backend team directly
and we investigate and fix the account if there is a bug.

Gmail tends to work very well for heavy users, but as with all complex
software there are edge cases. Sometimes people fall into those edges and if
you escalate through the help forums we'll see a rise in specific types of
user escalations and fix whatever bug is causing it.

Hope that helps, -Andrew

------
comicjk
Keeping a separate connection to the database for searching, which doesn't
effect the performance of the current messages? That sounds like the kind of
thing computers should be doing for us.

------
dungwiz
I too have been unable to get a full POP download of everything in my Gmail
account...a terrifying thought that this is all locked up with Google and
there's no way for me to get my own mail out.

~~~
atto
Try this: <http://gmvault.org/>

~~~
slig
Thanks! I've been looking for a way to migrate from @gmail to my own domain
using google apps and this looks exactly what I wanted.

------
jpxxx
Sad, I thought Gmail problems were limited to their IMAP implementation. It is
truly punishing once mailboxes start becoming sizable: broken attachment
downloads, spontaneous corruption of messages, and problems performing any
kind of folder operation.

------
brucehart
I've seen some speculation that Gmail slows down because your account is
assigned to a server with other older accounts which are also growing and
straining server capacity. Is it possible that the speed increase comes from
being assigned to a new server more than the decrease in mailbox size? It
would interesting to see someone test this by fully restoring their old
account in a new account and comparing performance.

------
pilif
To add data to the pool: I have 12 GB of email (all mail I ever received since
2001) in a (paid) Google Apps account and I do not experience an considerable
slowdown for at least a year now.

There were some issues with search before that (no other part was slow
though), but that went away over time.

------
forkrulassail
44.8 gig mail history. No speed issues, whatsoever.

------
fayyazkl
There is still a lot to admire. A few days back i pulled all of my email to
Thunderbird only to discover a few differences between g vs hot mail.

No pop account in hotmail, effectively every read message still appears unread
in the online email client. By default hotmail had an option checked to
"leaving only 14 days of email online". All the rest was virtually deleted and
therefore existed only on my computer. There was an insane plugin to submit
those all back to inbox without disturbing dates or subjects. However, that
only resulted in hotmail access being revoked after 150 or so emails since
there is some sort of cap on pushing emails at once to your account. The gmail
contacts and email search resembles that of google as a search engine. No
other comes near.

Still there is a lot of opportunity to improve this. PG wrote a list of top
ten products in which search was first and email was second. Sparrow might
have been a good effort. Let's see when it evolves further.

------
nyar
If speed is what you're after then you can't beat a standalone, desktop, mail
client.

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tsahyt
When my gmail was getting slower and slower I just dumped it and got myself a
mailserver. It's overkill, yes, but it's a temporary solution (I've got some
more in store for that box). In the meanwhile it's the fastest mailing
experience I've ever had :)

On a sidenote: The speed issues were not the reason for dumping gmail. Over
the years my email address has caught the attention of too many spammers.
Additionally I wanted to have my emails on one of my own boxes, not with
Google.

------
metalruler
Speaking of slowdowns - until recently, a gmail login quietly set cookies by
redirecting through multiple subdomains during the "Loading" prompt. Most
notable was that it passed through accounts.youtube.com to set a cookie.

It now seems to achieve this by using ocsp.thawte.com. Not sure how that
works, I can't see any HTTP or HTTPS fetches from youtube during gmail login,
yet it still manages to set a third party cookie. Can OCSP do this?

------
druiid
Huh, interesting. I haven't gotten to this point yet but was kind of wondering
about this. Does this mean that Google does not use any sort of indexing, or
is it not that great? I haven't seen any documentation about the internals of
Gmail so I can only wonder.

I know with Dovecot without proper (and properly stored... not on NFS) index
files, after about 9-10gigs of storage, IMAP and IMAP related tasks became
super slowwwww.

------
ck2
The slowness is probably how far apart your data is spread in the google
"cloud" over the years.

Map/reduce probably gets a heck of workout, imagine their entire global
database size, it must be staggering.

Maybe they can fix it by periodically rewriting the entire dataset for a
single user onto a cluster that is much closer together. Once a year?

------
habitue
Could this be the result of leaving everything in the inbox versus archiving
it?

~~~
zugheliang
I don't think so. I happen to archive EVERYTHING as I use the inbox TODO
pattern. However, my temporary solution is to empty the trash email. I've also
noticed that problems start to appear on the ~11 Gb range. As others have
mentioned, I also pay for extra storage and it is painful to see my sparrow
client timeout every 10 min.

------
mycodebreaks
If you decide to go back to your old email account, you'll end up having whole
bunch of emails marked as unread. I don't know if there is a setting to
forward an email and mark it read.

~~~
JeremyBanks
You can, you just need to set up a filter to do the forwarding rather than
using the global forwarding option.

