
Gmail has become unusably slow - taylorwc
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has-become-unsuably-slow.html
======
jkincaid
The Gmail team is most definitely aware of this and a fix is in the works. At
SXSW this year there was a panel with four or five Gmail team members and this
came up — they said it's related to the size of your inbox, and that it has a
lot of Googlers complaining internally too, since many of them have the
oldest/large accounts. Also see <http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-
slow/>, though it has basically the same info.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
That reference says "slowness is really only an issue for power users of the
service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages."

I only have 50K messages at a little over 4GB. People are saying they have
inboxes as full as mine and are still fast.

Something doesn't add up. Is my account on an old infrastructure?

~~~
mattmcknight
I have 7.1GB, it's still beyond fast. Size isn't a sufficient condition for
whatever problem it is you are seeing. The only time I had a problem was
before I abandoned greasemonkey.

Which operations are slow for you?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Everything is slow. Sending mail, switching labels, searching, even clicking
settings or the home icon. I've tried across lots of browsers and computers.
It's related to the account. Other, much smaller and newer accounts are fast.

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gojomo
_In a last ditch effort, I bought some extra storage from Google thinking
maybe I'd get some kind of premium level service. So far, no._

Ah, to be Google! Your _competitors_ , when frustrated by your poor service
and unclear communications, _send you more money_ in the vain hope it _might_
help.

~~~
scorpion032
Now, That's a clever catch!

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billturner
It's so rare that I use the actual GMail interface that I often forget how it
even works, or how slow it is. Shortly after GMail allowed IMAP access, I
hooked it up to my Mail.app and don't even bother with the web interface. It's
so much more convenient, and it's rare that I've have problems when the cries
of "GMail is down again" come about.

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rmorrison
I definitely think there is room in the market for a new, online, paid email
client. One that can connect to multiple outside accounts like Outlook,
"infinite" storage, emphasis on privacy, gmail-style user interface, regular
backups, and solid customer support. Email is extremely important to people
and they don't want to worry about it. I wouldn't mind paying for a reliable
and secure email client in the cloud.

~~~
qeorge
FWIW, we used hosted Exchange from MS: <http://microsoft.com/online/>

Its $5/user/month, 25GB storage, great webmail client, and hands down the best
support I've ever gotten.

~~~
mnemonik
Whoah, whoah whoah!

We have hosted Exchange at my university. The Outlook web client is perhaps
the worst piece of software I am forced to use on a regular basis.

The calendaring is completely useless on the web client. I can't see anyone
else's schedules so when I make meetings with them, its like shooting a rifle
blind folded. I have to do a "guess and check" method where if Outlook vomits
in my face and says someone is busy at that scheduled time, I just guess for
the next time slot till eventually one fits.

We don't have nearly as much space as you do, so I am forced to completely
delete all my messages 4 times a year to free up space. The UI makes this task
such a pain (admittedly it is the uni's fault for not forking up enough $$ for
enough space, but it is incredibly time wasting and difficult through the web
client).

Do I get some sort of notification when my inbox is full? No. Only, I stop
receiving emails and every would be sender gets a message that my inbox is
full. This continues until someone I meet in person tells me that they haven't
been able to communicate with me online for the larger part of the week. No
way to get those emails back.

Oh, and all this is after I forward all my messages to gmail and never use
Outlook unless I am forced to.

(Sorry, just venting and getting this off my chest.)

~~~
jodrellblank
Which version? If you're on Exchange 2003 then complaining about how a 7-8
year old program isn't up to scratch is a bit silly. Even 2007 is closing on 4
years old, and the web interface was improved a lot from 2003 to 2007 and
again from Exchange 2007 to 2010 (not sure about calendaring specifically).

And if you are on Exchange 2003 or 2007 then IE gets the good browser
interface, and every other browser gets a basic one.

 _Do I get some sort of notification when my inbox is full? No._

This is because someone hasn't turned it on for you; Exchange does this (by
default, I thought). Emails you when you hit the "no more sending" limit, then
again as you hit the "now so full you can't receive" limit.

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uptown
Google says they're aware of the speed issue, that they have a solution, and
that they're fixing it.

<http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/>

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mgcross
I've got <8000 emails at around 2GB. Gmail seems to have been slow for the
past couple of weeks, but it does vary. Usually 20-30 seconds to load Gmail;
15-20 seconds to open an email. 30 seconds or more to send.

I just hid chat, buzz and 'web clips'. I also set the theme back to classic.
Not sure what did it (or if it was even something I did), but it's back to
normal now, even if I turn everything back on.

~~~
harry
Themes caused the most round-about slowdown for me when they were introduced.
I haven't gone back to using any theme sense and I get fast speeds on a 5k msg
account.

Also - Hooray for a free, fantastic email service. Thanks google!

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pilif
I have all mail since 2001 (around 80'000 messages) in my google (apps, paid)
account. While the web interface is still acceptably fast (as long as I don't
browse my All Mail label), but the iphone (and ipad) frontend has become
unbearably slow in the last few weeks.

It opens quickly, loads the locally cached page and then it's just spinning
and spinning for up to 5 minutes before it either reloads the page completely,
signs me out again or finally displays the new mail.

Considering this is a product from a company that places so much importance on
speed, this is completely inacceptable, IMHO.

~~~
tritowntim
I had the same problem with the iPhone web UI. Delete the local HTML5 database
from Mobile Safari, then kill and restart Mobile Safari, or restart your
phone. Once I did this, iPhone web gmail was fast again.

------
RyanMcGreal
It continues to amaze me that a company as technically brilliant and pervasive
as Google is so spectacularly bad at even rudimentary customer service.

~~~
charlesju
There is no way Google can scale customer service to be profitable for free
services. Gmail at the end of the day is a free service, and you should either
(a) pick a different email provider or (b) setup shop yourself if you need
that kind of service.

~~~
icey
Is there any software out there that handles spam as well as Gmail's spam
filter?

The rest of the features that Gmail offers seem like they'd be hard to
replicate as well - I'm talking about the cool stuff like being able to put
arbitrary periods in your email address, or adding +whatever to the end of it.

I really like Gmail today, but if there were a way to replicate all the nice
things it does on a server I controlled that would be pretty sweet.

~~~
Terretta
Out of curiosity, why?

Does your cost calculation include opportunity cost of time?

If Google does it well, why would you want to spend your time on duplicating
that instead of spending your time on your own original skill?

~~~
icey
Mostly because I want to see how it works.

That and I can't shake the fear that one day my Google account will be locked
for some mysterious reason and I'll be stuck without any of my email until I
can figure out how to get it turned back on.

I don't have the advantage of being a blogger, and that seems to be the only
reliable way to get customer service from Google.

~~~
Terretta
I recommend using Gmail (ideally, Google Apps for Your Domain) as your
primary, and using an IMAP sync tool to back it up to something not owned by
Google.

With some a hundred employee accounts in Gmail for the past several years, I'd
say it's been more reliable than the local electric company. We've never
needed customer service from Google for Gmail.

We're all engineers, but we have better things to do than run email servers.
Email is a problem we can happily consider "solved".

------
webwright
Time for DuckDuckEmail, I say! :-)

~~~
jodrellblank
I'd be tempted to design a "Never delete email again! We autodelete all email
10 days after receipt! Mandatory!" service.

It would be able to be cheap/free/low infrastructure by not needing masses of
storage, and stay fast by not needing to handle tens of thousands of mails.
And it wouldn't need a complex UI or tagging/labelling/tabbing/folders.

Also it would encourage / enforce dealing with mails and getting the
information of of your mailbox and putting it wherever it needs to be.

It would also probably need to have a tie-in with some persona wiki and
dropbox so you could easily shunt relevant content that you need to keep.

I think many people would find that they just don't need most old email and
wouldn't miss it. The panic of "I have it around somewhere, let me spend time
searching ... I think Bob sent it to me one time" is replaced by the certainty
of "I don't have it".

If email was physical stuff, we'd call email archiving a hording disorder.

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blehn
interesting. i guess I have about 7k emails stored in my account. maybe 10
labels. a bunch of labs featues enabled. and everything is usually pretty
instant for me. searches never take more than a second or two. There's an
occassional hiccup, but nothing really troubling.

using chrome and FF on OSX

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I have 50,689 messages now, down from ~68K. So I deleted like 18K. Again, it
seems ridiculous that I need to delete messages.

However, it is even more ridiculous that if this is the solution that works,
Gmail makes it really hard to make it work. There is no way to search for the
biggest messages. There is no way to isolate all mailing lists. I can't find a
way to search for [ in the subject.

I ended up launching up etacts and otherinbox and looking for people I used to
contact years ago (old projects) and deleted emails from those projects.

~~~
hokkos
How do you know the total number of message is gmail ?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Go to All Mail.

~~~
chrisbolt
That's the total number of conversations.

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sucuri2
I was having the exact same problem when my account was using around 85% of
the allowed storage.

I also had another account with very little emails stored and it was pretty
fast.

My solution (quite lame): I redirected the "full" account to the other one and
started to only use the later. So far no more problems...

------
pkrumins
As I was reading your article, I got an idea. Create Duck Duck Mail! Your
search engine is awesome, and I bet your mail service would be awesome too!

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nlawalker
Only 730 MB, 11309 messages here, and I can confirm that the service has been
steadily slowing over the past three or four weeks. Loading my inbox from
scratch can take well over 10 seconds, and I have reproduced this on multiple
machines in my home and multiple machines on my corporate network. Starting
new emails, sending emails, switching labels, all slow.

------
kilps
As an aside; is there a web based email service/client comparable to gmail?
More particularly is there one which handles conversation view as well as
gmail does? Until there is then gmail has a bit of a monopoly on users like me
who love the client and everything that sets it apart from traditional email.

~~~
mgcross
Zimbra threads messages and offers the best webmail I've found outside of
Gmail. Definitely feels more sluggish than Gmail though.

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tybris
Well, at least it works. When I open it in Chrome I get:

The webpage at
[https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail...](https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail&passive=true&rm=false&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F%3Fshva%3D1%26ui%3Dhtml%26zy%3Dl&ss=1&scc=1&ltmpl=default&ltmplcache=2)
has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or
allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a
server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

(and of course, clearing cookies does not work)

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scdlbx
I'm using over 5200MB, over 90,000 messages and 54 labels and haven't noticed
any speed problems. Though the majority of my messages are archived, with only
~6000 in my inbox.

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curiousfiddler
I think you've got to see this video really:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk&feature=related)

I think gmail is a fabulous product (imagine emails before gmail) and like
every other agile product, it has its problems. The fact that we don't have to
spend "any" money for storing gigs of our data on a secure and safe platform
is probably enough for me to use it.

------
cookiecaper
Browsing mail is still adequately fast for me; I have 33k threads and I don't
have any problem loading up labels or switching back and forth from inbox to
any other thing. I'm using 2GB of space.

I did find the search slow and inadequate though, so I downloaded and indexed
all of my messages with Thunderbird and just use that when I want to search
for something. I need to do an export to a conventional mbox or something
soon, too.

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emehrkay
My account was deactivated today for no apparent reason. It allowed me to
reactive it by giving them my phone number. What's good Google?

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ireadzalot
I am running at 42% of storage. What I do is archive my messages every couple
of weeks. I have noticed it always helps.

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phreanix
I also noticed that Google Apps (docs, etc.) really spikes my processor load.
Anybody else experiencing this?

~~~
strebler
Google docs has been doing that for me for a few months, I found that if I
close the main docs screen after opening a document (in a new window), it
usually fixes the problem.

~~~
phreanix
Thanks, I might have discovered that too, but I lost track of which fix worked
lol.

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melling
A few months ago my gmail was slow I deleted my mail down from 23k msgs to
under 1000. I nuke all unstarred msgs from mailing lists, etc. Seemed to help.
Although still not lightning fast (like the Chrome browser :-)).

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Kilimanjaro
My only complain is about loading time. It takes forever.

Compared to Google Reader, which loads the UI instantly, then loads the data,
I say Gmail should work that way.

Don't let me stare at a white page with a retarded progress bar for a minute.

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stef25
It was extremely slow for me for a couple of days (so slow it was unusable)
but then it fixed itself. Seemed more like a temporary issue or bug than
something related to inbox size.

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Jeema3000
"Gmail has become unusably slow"

If it's that bad, then it begs the question: why do you continue to use it?
There's plenty of alternatives. Vote with your feet and let them know.

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kbrower
Would be curious to know if pop and imap are also slow

~~~
billturner
For me, IMAP is not slow at all. In fact, I almost never have a problem with
GMail over IMAP at all - and I have 3 separate email accounts (some under
google apps for your domain) that all check every 30 minutes or so).

~~~
kevinelliott
Let's not forget that IMAP clients often queue the connection requests, so
that when you hit Send it gives them illusion that it was quick, while it's
often still sending in the background.

~~~
cmelbye
Gmail's web interface would do that too. It's not like it just blocks with a
white page while it waits to send.

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elight
Serioously and i thought that it was just me. I'm so glad to have found GMail
Users Not-so-anonymous!

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TwoSheds
I have 600 MB stuff there, and it certainly beats my corporate Outlook in
speed...

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coned88
I stopped using gmail a while ago. I use lavabit now and its so much better.

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orblivion
I had enough and switched back to the "Older Version". It's not bad that way.

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dalore
Yet another reason to jump on the GTD bandwagon and have a 0 emails in your
inbox policy.

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papachito
It's still very fast here.

~~~
vhawk
it'sachingly slow here in england, not so bad on IE but dreadsful on firefox

