4 ms·

I bet the amount of traffic GMail handles would be considered a DoS if it was redirected to one of the smaller mail sites.

brongondwana 11y ago
Back in the day (/shakes fist at cloud) it was the slashdot effect. Rapid spikes in popularity overloading systems. We certainly couldn't handle scaling up to gmail size all at once. Maybe over a couple of years. Of course our growth strategy is quality (people willing to pay for a good service quid-pro-quo) over quantity (free service and monetise later via ads/analytics), so we've had a slow steady growth for the entire 15 years we've been operating rather than the viral growth and sell-out/pivot that unicorns are known for.
- jorangreef 11y ago
  Quality and quantity are not necessarily opposed. People like Ford and Edison used to believe that you could get more quality as volume increased. And in fact, if you wanted to increase quality, then you had to increase volume.
  - brongondwana 11y ago
    There's an "average size of humans has increased" joke in here somewhere - both height and girth. And I do agree to a point. We're very happy to have increasing numbers of users so we can afford to do things like contracting the excellent developer who's working on JMAP support for Calendars in Cyrus IMAP at the moment, as well as hiring people to add new features or improve existing ones. We do try to stay at a point where we can run comfortably on 50% of our hardware, so we can shut down half our machines at once for maintenance. Redundancy certainly helps - we've blogged a few times about how good it is to be able to shut down any one machine with only a few minutes' warning to move active users off it. I'm certainly looking forward to spending time again on what I wanted to be doing (Cyrus IMAPd improvements at the moment) rather than battling a DDoS!
thrownaway2424 11y ago
Indeed, Gmail maintains extensive protections against peers being DoS'd by Gmail. The number of connections and the rate of mail is closely controlled, because a lot of sites can be taken down just by opening a few TCP connections at once (what are they using, inetd on SunOS?).

brongondwana 11y ago

Back in the day (/shakes fist at cloud) it was the slashdot effect. Rapid spikes in popularity overloading systems. We certainly couldn't handle scaling up to gmail size all at once. Maybe over a couple of years. Of course our growth strategy is quality (people willing to pay for a good service quid-pro-quo) over quantity (free service and monetise later via ads/analytics), so we've had a slow steady growth for the entire 15 years we've been operating rather than the viral growth and sell-out/pivot that unicorns are known for.

jorangreef 11y ago
Quality and quantity are not necessarily opposed. People like Ford and Edison used to believe that you could get more quality as volume increased. And in fact, if you wanted to increase quality, then you had to increase volume.
- brongondwana 11y ago
  There's an "average size of humans has increased" joke in here somewhere - both height and girth. And I do agree to a point. We're very happy to have increasing numbers of users so we can afford to do things like contracting the excellent developer who's working on JMAP support for Calendars in Cyrus IMAP at the moment, as well as hiring people to add new features or improve existing ones. We do try to stay at a point where we can run comfortably on 50% of our hardware, so we can shut down half our machines at once for maintenance. Redundancy certainly helps - we've blogged a few times about how good it is to be able to shut down any one machine with only a few minutes' warning to move active users off it. I'm certainly looking forward to spending time again on what I wanted to be doing (Cyrus IMAPd improvements at the moment) rather than battling a DDoS!

thrownaway2424 11y ago

Indeed, Gmail maintains extensive protections against peers being DoS'd by Gmail. The number of connections and the rate of mail is closely controlled, because a lot of sites can be taken down just by opening a few TCP connections at once (what are they using, inetd on SunOS?).