4 ms·

Yes. I was complaining into the air on twitter, and their support responded by asking me to clear the cache and cookie. I told them: no man, it's not cache and

by iamwil 8y ago

Yes. I was complaining into the air on twitter, and their support responded by asking me to clear the cache and cookie. I told them: no man, it's not cache and cookies. You're loading too much stuff on initialization. It takes about 45 seconds for page load, and it's not until 1m37s that I can compose an email. You're making about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. That's the size of a long pop song on iTunes! I've now bookmarked the old "html gmail" just so I can compose emails in a jiffy. I think they assume I leave a browser tab open for email. Not when it's so heavy weight.

bassman9000 8y ago
> about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. This is insane. So I went to test it. 358 requests, 6.3MB, 20 seconds till full load. Compared to the standard, really old view (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en): 14 requests, 25.3KB, 2 seconds. Edit: fans were spinning hard, so I opened the task manager: after CPU went down from ~90% tab is using 600-700MB, stable, with the dev console open, 400-500MB closed. 400MB to check my email.
- userbinator 8y ago
  25.3KB, 2 seconds That's what the size of a webmail app should be measured in --- kilobytes, not megabytes. A megabyte of code is a lot, and I'd guess a lot of developers just don't have the intuition of how much that is; to put it into perspective, this is an entire operating system in 1.44MB: http://menuetos.net/ http://menuetos.net/
  - bassman9000 8y ago
    Went to test Fastmail after some other poster suggested it. Granted, inbox is empty, but feels way faster that gmail, on par with basic gmail, with more functionality. No cache reload: 28 requests, 114KB, 2.45 seconds. With cache: 28 requests, 12KB, 2.65 seconds. Funny: UI seems ready after 1 second, but there's an eventsource request that dwarfs the rest in the waterfall, taking the rest of the time. Edit: playing around with the UI, feels close to native. Edit 2: downvotes, feel free to engage in discussion. Getting tired of the HN mob.
    - artwr 8y ago
      Thanks for the informative benchmark. I am (slowly) considering alternatives, are you also considering making the jump?
      - bassman9000 8y ago
        Strongly, yes. Fastmail has a help/blog post to help you migrate. I'm concerned about the large size of my gmail inbox (13+ year user), though. They mention actual emails import too, but haven't tested yet.
- kenhwang 8y ago
  Jeez, you weren't kidding. ~2.5MB on Chrome and ~5.5MB on FF transferred, which uncompresses to >20MB and takes around 20 seconds to become responsive.
  - wingerlang 8y ago
    For me it's fast, lots of requests (200+) but only 600kb loaded. UI feels fine / snappy and I can compose within seconds.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  ... what the hell is gmail doing to suck up that much memory? It shouldn't take more than 1KB per message to store all potentially-relevant message headers, and even the textual content [i.e., no attachments] is unlikely to consume more than a few KB. That takes 100,000s of messages to reach 400MB, which is roughly on the order of "save every message you have ever received for several years."
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    They have to track your every mouse move, what you type, when you type, where you hover your cursor, how long you took to type an email, who knows what else. Extreme surveillance takes extreme resources.
  - bassman9000 8y ago
    There's an increased amount of crap being added, like the side menus. And I have pretty much all behaviors (e.g. menu on hover) disabled.
- tty89 8y ago
  30MB in 288 Requests in new Gmail 105KB in 20 requests in html version https://imgur.com/a/OvBrDAk https://imgur.com/a/OvBrDAk
beerlord 8y ago
It was enough for me to take my staff over to a Microsoft-hosted email account. Outlooks just sits in the background using a few dozen megabytes, and has a better UI than Gmail. You don't need to hunt through Chrome tabs to find your email client, or load a webpage each time you want to check email. Having a native desktop application is a much better experience.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  It's a shame that everyone is moving away from native applications. Web apps and things like electron have their place. But if you are creating an application to be used all the time, you should make it native.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    The problem is how hard it has become to make native apps on all platforms. Too much work and they never look and feel the same either. Electron is fine, and webapps can be very fast, but that takes proper coding with a focus on performance and UX. Many companies just don't care.

by iamwil 8y ago

bassman9000 8y ago

> about 285 requests (19MB) before I can compose. This is insane. So I went to test it. 358 requests, 6.3MB, 20 seconds till full load. Compared to the standard, really old view (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en): 14 requests, 25.3KB, 2 seconds. Edit: fans were spinning hard, so I opened the task manager: after CPU went down from ~90% tab is using 600-700MB, stable, with the dev console open, 400-500MB closed. 400MB to check my email.

userbinator 8y ago
25.3KB, 2 seconds That's what the size of a webmail app should be measured in --- kilobytes, not megabytes. A megabyte of code is a lot, and I'd guess a lot of developers just don't have the intuition of how much that is; to put it into perspective, this is an entire operating system in 1.44MB: http://menuetos.net/ http://menuetos.net/
- bassman9000 8y ago
  Went to test Fastmail after some other poster suggested it. Granted, inbox is empty, but feels way faster that gmail, on par with basic gmail, with more functionality. No cache reload: 28 requests, 114KB, 2.45 seconds. With cache: 28 requests, 12KB, 2.65 seconds. Funny: UI seems ready after 1 second, but there's an eventsource request that dwarfs the rest in the waterfall, taking the rest of the time. Edit: playing around with the UI, feels close to native. Edit 2: downvotes, feel free to engage in discussion. Getting tired of the HN mob.
  - artwr 8y ago
    Thanks for the informative benchmark. I am (slowly) considering alternatives, are you also considering making the jump?
    - bassman9000 8y ago
      Strongly, yes. Fastmail has a help/blog post to help you migrate. I'm concerned about the large size of my gmail inbox (13+ year user), though. They mention actual emails import too, but haven't tested yet.
kenhwang 8y ago
Jeez, you weren't kidding. ~2.5MB on Chrome and ~5.5MB on FF transferred, which uncompresses to >20MB and takes around 20 seconds to become responsive.
- wingerlang 8y ago
  For me it's fast, lots of requests (200+) but only 600kb loaded. UI feels fine / snappy and I can compose within seconds.
jcranmer 8y ago
... what the hell is gmail doing to suck up that much memory? It shouldn't take more than 1KB per message to store all potentially-relevant message headers, and even the textual content [i.e., no attachments] is unlikely to consume more than a few KB. That takes 100,000s of messages to reach 400MB, which is roughly on the order of "save every message you have ever received for several years."
- jjeaff 8y ago
  They have to track your every mouse move, what you type, when you type, where you hover your cursor, how long you took to type an email, who knows what else. Extreme surveillance takes extreme resources.
- bassman9000 8y ago
  There's an increased amount of crap being added, like the side menus. And I have pretty much all behaviors (e.g. menu on hover) disabled.
tty89 8y ago
30MB in 288 Requests in new Gmail 105KB in 20 requests in html version https://imgur.com/a/OvBrDAk https://imgur.com/a/OvBrDAk

beerlord 8y ago

It was enough for me to take my staff over to a Microsoft-hosted email account. Outlooks just sits in the background using a few dozen megabytes, and has a better UI than Gmail. You don't need to hunt through Chrome tabs to find your email client, or load a webpage each time you want to check email. Having a native desktop application is a much better experience.

jjeaff 8y ago
It's a shame that everyone is moving away from native applications. Web apps and things like electron have their place. But if you are creating an application to be used all the time, you should make it native.
- manigandham 8y ago
  The problem is how hard it has become to make native apps on all platforms. Too much work and they never look and feel the same either. Electron is fine, and webapps can be very fast, but that takes proper coding with a focus on performance and UX. Many companies just don't care.