8 ms·

Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back

103 points by ssclafani 16y ago

tim-robinson 16y ago
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.
bryne 16y ago
I just enable the app in Labs that puts the "Beta" tag back on the Gmail logo and my anger instantly subsides!
epochwolf 16y ago
One more reason I use imap to access the various gmail accounts I have.
rue 16y ago
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 16y ago
  It's not as if they've had a massive influx of new users, though. It happened suddenly a few weeks ago to me.
drcode 16y ago
I concur it has been weirdly slow for a few weeks now.
shaddi 16y ago
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.
- crgwbr 16y ago
  For me its searches and UI. Some searches take upwards of 20 seconds. Messages take 2-3 seconds to open. Just overall slugishness
- mlinsey 16y ago
  On some occasions, seemingly at random from the end user perspective, either logging in, loading a message, or sending a message can take upwards of 30 seconds. Searches are usually fine for me. Loading emails on my phone using IMAP also takes forever.
  - iampims 16y ago
    “Checking for mail…” on my iPhone takes forever, on 3G or edge[1] but works mostly fine when on Wifi. In comparison, while waiting for new emails to be downloaded, I can download unread articles from Instapaper and fetching 200 new tweets on Twitter for iPhone. And most of the time, I don’t have new emails… it’s just the connection that takes forever. [1] this happens equally in bad network reception conditions and excellent network conditions.
    - larsberg 16y ago
      Don't forget to configure the advanced IMAP settings for gmail. By default, you get the spam, sent items, and all mail folders as well -- disable them. Otherwise, it's hello to 2x copies of every message and re-scanning folders you don't care about...
      - iampims 16y ago
        Do you think that the increase in latency for fetching new emails is correlated to the increase in labels used in gmail?
- rfrey 16y ago
  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.
losvedir 16y ago
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-unsuably-slow.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has-become... [2] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail-is-fast-again.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail-is-fast...
83457 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Honestly sign ups are the crappiest part of GAE. It is smooth as a breeze after that.
jaspero 16y ago
I have started to feel that Gmail is getting bloated with features. I want my mail to be simple and lightning fast.
- noarchy 16y ago
  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.
- gintas 16y ago
  One person's bloat is another persons feature (though personally I agree with the spirit of your comment).
heyjonboy 16y ago
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.
boredguy8 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
dnsworks 16y ago
Hey TechCrunch, Penny-Arcade called and they want their burn back.
noarchy 16y ago
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.
sdrinf 16y ago
Empirically: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cm... Statistically: http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+slow 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 16y ago
  um...the trends in both of those data sets can be attributed to increasing market share/user base of Gmail over that time.
- dhbanes 16y ago
  http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+fast&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+fast&ctab=0&geo... Unfortunately, my Gmail account has been incredibly slow for the last couple months as well.
jmm 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Someone ought to show him the wonders of embedding. http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/
davegan 16y ago
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=gtag_slowloading http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=g... 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.
anto1ne 16y ago
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 ?
jewbacca 16y ago
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.
dkasper 16y ago
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!
DrStalker 16y ago
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.
DifE-Q 16y ago
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.
clofresh 16y ago
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.
chrismsnz 16y ago
Coming from the site with a 20-second page load :\
kin 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
andreshb 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Why all of the sudden? Upgrade regression?
daniel_iversen 16y ago
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 http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+slow would be misleading because all they show is that more people are using GMail ;)
crazydiamond 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Maybe due to the extra traffic that comes with something like Google Instant Search?
zavulon 16y ago
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.
wholypoly 16y ago
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.
xal 16y ago
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.
smackfu 16y ago
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?

103 points by ssclafani 16y ago

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.

bryne 16y ago

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

epochwolf 16y ago

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

rue 16y ago

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 16y ago
It's not as if they've had a massive influx of new users, though. It happened suddenly a few weeks ago to me.

drcode 16y ago

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

shaddi 16y ago

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.

crgwbr 16y ago
For me its searches and UI. Some searches take upwards of 20 seconds. Messages take 2-3 seconds to open. Just overall slugishness
mlinsey 16y ago
On some occasions, seemingly at random from the end user perspective, either logging in, loading a message, or sending a message can take upwards of 30 seconds. Searches are usually fine for me. Loading emails on my phone using IMAP also takes forever.
- iampims 16y ago
  “Checking for mail…” on my iPhone takes forever, on 3G or edge[1] but works mostly fine when on Wifi. In comparison, while waiting for new emails to be downloaded, I can download unread articles from Instapaper and fetching 200 new tweets on Twitter for iPhone. And most of the time, I don’t have new emails… it’s just the connection that takes forever. [1] this happens equally in bad network reception conditions and excellent network conditions.
  - larsberg 16y ago
    Don't forget to configure the advanced IMAP settings for gmail. By default, you get the spam, sent items, and all mail folders as well -- disable them. Otherwise, it's hello to 2x copies of every message and re-scanning folders you don't care about...
    - iampims 16y ago
      Do you think that the increase in latency for fetching new emails is correlated to the increase in labels used in gmail?
rfrey 16y ago
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.

losvedir 16y ago

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

83457 16y ago

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 16y ago
Honestly sign ups are the crappiest part of GAE. It is smooth as a breeze after that.

jaspero 16y ago

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

noarchy 16y ago
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.
gintas 16y ago
One person's bloat is another persons feature (though personally I agree with the spirit of your comment).

heyjonboy 16y ago

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.

boredguy8 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

dnsworks 16y ago

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

noarchy 16y ago

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.

sdrinf 16y ago

Empirically: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cm... Statistically: http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+slow 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 16y ago
um...the trends in both of those data sets can be attributed to increasing market share/user base of Gmail over that time.
dhbanes 16y ago
http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+fast&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+fast&ctab=0&geo... Unfortunately, my Gmail account has been incredibly slow for the last couple months as well.

jmm 16y ago

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 16y ago
Someone ought to show him the wonders of embedding. http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/

davegan 16y ago

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=gtag_slowloading http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=g... 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.

anto1ne 16y ago

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 ?

jewbacca 16y ago

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.

dkasper 16y ago

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!

DrStalker 16y ago

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.

DifE-Q 16y ago

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.

clofresh 16y ago

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.

chrismsnz 16y ago

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

kin 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

andreshb 16y ago

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 16y ago
Why all of the sudden? Upgrade regression?

daniel_iversen 16y ago

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

crazydiamond 16y ago

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 16y ago
Maybe due to the extra traffic that comes with something like Google Instant Search?

zavulon 16y ago

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.

wholypoly 16y ago

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.

xal 16y ago

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.

smackfu 16y ago

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?