4 ms·

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 s

by 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.
- cma 16y ago
  With 200,000 android handsets activated per day (a pretty large chunk probably never had a google account prior), I would expect them to have started having issues.
  - joshfinnie 16y ago
    That is a great point. GMail has always been our little secret, but now that android requires one (I think), the userbase is exploding. I am wondering if Google was ill-prepared for this onslaught, never thinking that the popularity of android directly correlates with the popularity of GMail!
- kmfrk 16y ago
  I consider my e-mails filtered and labelled beyond the inbox to be downright inaccessible at the moment. It takes ages if I take upon me the monumental task of navigating to e-mails outside my inbox. And this is in Chrome - not some kind of Google-forsaken browser like Opera.
scotth 16y ago
I'm experiencing what techcrunch describes. Opening email and opening the rich text interface when composing are the two places I see it most. Sometimes the operation won't complete at all, claiming there is a connectivity issue. Other times it will complete, but will frequently take 30+ seconds.
Zev 16y ago
Searches flat out don't work for me. It sits there loading and loading. And then it changes to say "Still loading…", but it never shows results. This also causes problems with labels; I can't filter email, at all. As an example of how slow Gmail is at times: I've started a search for something before going out to lunch for an hour. When I came back, it hadn't found any results yet. As far as I could tell, it didn't time out. This was sometime in July and it hasn't gotten any better. There's also the problem where mail from my college's mail server shows up anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 days after it is sent out by someone. Needless to say, this causes problems when talking to professors, unless I use the email account provided my my college.
dreaming 16y ago
No issues here either, however perhaps with only 1200mb in my inbox, i'm not enough of a power user to challenge gmail...
- pyre 16y ago
  I run into these issues with only 400Mb in my work account.
barrkel 16y ago
If it takes more than 0.1 of a second to check if I have mail, or move from one mail to the next, it's slow. This is why I use a desktop client.
- cryptoz 16y ago
  Searching in Thunderbird takes forever, sometimes > 30 seconds. Searching in Gmail takes < 1 second. This is why I use a web client.
  - gvb 16y ago
    Do you have the "Global Search and Indexer" turned off? It is found in Preferences / Advanced tab / General - disable and then restart Tbird. Global search is an evil POS.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Well, if you turn it off, you no longer incur the periodic indexing overhead, but then the search really will be slow. With global indexing on, I can search tens of thousands of messages in several hundred folders in a few seconds; with it off, a search over all folders will never return and I have to kill TB.
  - scrod 16y ago
    Searching in Mac OS X's Mail.app is instantaneous, because the message content and metadata are already included in your Spotlight database.
duck 16y ago
Searching here as well, which is a real killer since that is basically how I use Gmail. Also, and I just noticed this today, it took forever for the virus scan to work. I had to download about 20+ files and almost everyone of them took 30 or more seconds to scan so I could see the download link.
jackowayed 16y ago
I've been having this problem lately, manifesting itself thusly: * Loading GMail takes up to 20 seconds. That was only one time, but at least once a day I see "Loading <myemail>@gmail.com" for >5s. * Sometimes conversations take seconds to load. * I usually see "Sending..." for a few seconds when I send an email. Occasionally, I get server errors when sending. * Searches are even slower than they've always been. And I'm not even close to hitting my space limit: "You are currently using 708 MB (9%) of your 7515 MB." Another issue: I have 4 Priority Inbox "sections": Important, Starred, a label, and Everything else. The sections with Starred and the label are often stale. Right now, the label section just has nothing in it. There's plenty of email from that label. If anyone from Google is reading this, my email is in my profile, but not the one that's the problem. Email me, and I'll be happy to tell you my @gmail.com username that is problematic.
- swombat 16y ago
  Clicking on "Inbox" to refresh the inbox also takes several seconds - sometimes many seconds.
pyre 16y ago
* Sometimes when I click on conversations in my inbox it will say "Could not load the selected conversation" in the error message at the top. Sometimes it will actually load the conversation, but still display this error message. Sometimes the most recent 5 emails will all not be loadable unless I do a full page reload. Sometimes not even after a full page reload. * Sometimes the Inbox display count on the sidebar and the contents of the inbox get out of sync. E.g. The sidebar displays "Inbox (1)", but there are no unread conversations displayed in my inbox listing until I hit the 'refresh' link at the top of the inbox. * Searches take ~10 seconds or more. * Sometimes actions start to timeout with a "Loading...", which turns into a "Still Loading..." which sits there for 20 seconds or so before the action goes through. * A couple of times the gchat applet has timed out while the rest of the gmail interface worked fine. A full page refresh didn't fix it (it would continue to timeout while trying to log me in). After a full page reload the GChat app completely disappeared. Even the 'enable/disable gchat' links at the bottom of the page were missing. Once I was able to remedy this by deleting all of my cookies for * .google.com. The second time I had to find a forum post suggesting that I enable the Google Labs feature to move GTalk to the right side of the Gmail interface (which worked). A week later I disabled that hack and the regular version was working again, though sometimes it will timeout. * Sometimes co-workers will appear offline in GTalk even though they aren't. * Sometimes a GTalk conversation will get into a 'wedged' state where it is impossible to close the little popup window (only minimize it). Neither hitting Esc, not clicking the close button/link with the mouse will get rid of it. The only remedy is a full page refresh (which is akin to just re-logging into Gmail; the 'loading' progress bar comes up and everything). It's important to note that sometimes when things start to timeout, it will happen for a period of maybe 5 minutes or so, and then everything is snappy again (this applies only to the Gmail issues, not the GTalk/GChat issues). And during this time none of my co-workers is having any issues. But we all experience the periodic DoS of Gmail (for lack of a better term).
jbooth 16y ago
They mean "Sometimes, almost as slow as the other email providers" -- when someone's the top dog, and they make a minor slip, it's always news for various human reasons. Although I have noticed a little slowdown. Just noticing the higher standards for Google while I'm at it :)
mfukar 16y ago
My worst issue with Gmail at the moment is that I have a label for a mailing list with a good amount of traffic (at least 700 emails a day) and searching, browsing through pages and deleting emails from it takes anywhere from 3 seconds to 3 minutes. In terms of perceived speed and responsiveness alone, even Outlook is faster than Gmail's web interface at the moment.. Also, loading Gmail indeed takes about 20-25 seconds, but that's a small issue for me (yay for one-time costs).
xtho 16y ago
I just tried to send an e-mail. After a few seconds I got tired looking at the "Loading" label, so I switched to html mode. I personally wouldn't say it's slow. I'd rather call it broken.
bad_user 16y ago
I've been having this problem for the past 2 weeks. Before that performance was stellar.
tworats 16y ago
Loading gmail is sometimes relatively fast, sometimes incredibly slow. Search is consistently slow. Displaying a message after clicking on it is sometimes very slow, sometimes ok. Sending messages can take an inordinate amount of time on occasion. Receiving email is still generally reasonably fast, but occasionally a message will take an hour to show up (messages before and after it showing up just fine). Overall it feels quite sluggish, nothing like it was a year ago. The new Yahoo Mail on the other hand is surprisingly fast and slick. Quite a role reversal.

by shaddi 16y ago

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.

cma 16y ago
With 200,000 android handsets activated per day (a pretty large chunk probably never had a google account prior), I would expect them to have started having issues.
- joshfinnie 16y ago
  That is a great point. GMail has always been our little secret, but now that android requires one (I think), the userbase is exploding. I am wondering if Google was ill-prepared for this onslaught, never thinking that the popularity of android directly correlates with the popularity of GMail!
kmfrk 16y ago
I consider my e-mails filtered and labelled beyond the inbox to be downright inaccessible at the moment. It takes ages if I take upon me the monumental task of navigating to e-mails outside my inbox. And this is in Chrome - not some kind of Google-forsaken browser like Opera.

scotth 16y ago

I'm experiencing what techcrunch describes. Opening email and opening the rich text interface when composing are the two places I see it most. Sometimes the operation won't complete at all, claiming there is a connectivity issue. Other times it will complete, but will frequently take 30+ seconds.

Zev 16y ago

Searches flat out don't work for me. It sits there loading and loading. And then it changes to say "Still loading…", but it never shows results. This also causes problems with labels; I can't filter email, at all. As an example of how slow Gmail is at times: I've started a search for something before going out to lunch for an hour. When I came back, it hadn't found any results yet. As far as I could tell, it didn't time out. This was sometime in July and it hasn't gotten any better. There's also the problem where mail from my college's mail server shows up anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 days after it is sent out by someone. Needless to say, this causes problems when talking to professors, unless I use the email account provided my my college.

dreaming 16y ago

No issues here either, however perhaps with only 1200mb in my inbox, i'm not enough of a power user to challenge gmail...

pyre 16y ago
I run into these issues with only 400Mb in my work account.

barrkel 16y ago

If it takes more than 0.1 of a second to check if I have mail, or move from one mail to the next, it's slow. This is why I use a desktop client.

cryptoz 16y ago
Searching in Thunderbird takes forever, sometimes > 30 seconds. Searching in Gmail takes < 1 second. This is why I use a web client.
- gvb 16y ago
  Do you have the "Global Search and Indexer" turned off? It is found in Preferences / Advanced tab / General - disable and then restart Tbird. Global search is an evil POS.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Well, if you turn it off, you no longer incur the periodic indexing overhead, but then the search really will be slow. With global indexing on, I can search tens of thousands of messages in several hundred folders in a few seconds; with it off, a search over all folders will never return and I have to kill TB.
- scrod 16y ago
  Searching in Mac OS X's Mail.app is instantaneous, because the message content and metadata are already included in your Spotlight database.

duck 16y ago

Searching here as well, which is a real killer since that is basically how I use Gmail. Also, and I just noticed this today, it took forever for the virus scan to work. I had to download about 20+ files and almost everyone of them took 30 or more seconds to scan so I could see the download link.

jackowayed 16y ago

I've been having this problem lately, manifesting itself thusly: * Loading GMail takes up to 20 seconds. That was only one time, but at least once a day I see "Loading <myemail>@gmail.com" for >5s. * Sometimes conversations take seconds to load. * I usually see "Sending..." for a few seconds when I send an email. Occasionally, I get server errors when sending. * Searches are even slower than they've always been. And I'm not even close to hitting my space limit: "You are currently using 708 MB (9%) of your 7515 MB." Another issue: I have 4 Priority Inbox "sections": Important, Starred, a label, and Everything else. The sections with Starred and the label are often stale. Right now, the label section just has nothing in it. There's plenty of email from that label. If anyone from Google is reading this, my email is in my profile, but not the one that's the problem. Email me, and I'll be happy to tell you my @gmail.com username that is problematic.

swombat 16y ago
Clicking on "Inbox" to refresh the inbox also takes several seconds - sometimes many seconds.

pyre 16y ago

* Sometimes when I click on conversations in my inbox it will say "Could not load the selected conversation" in the error message at the top. Sometimes it will actually load the conversation, but still display this error message. Sometimes the most recent 5 emails will all not be loadable unless I do a full page reload. Sometimes not even after a full page reload. * Sometimes the Inbox display count on the sidebar and the contents of the inbox get out of sync. E.g. The sidebar displays "Inbox (1)", but there are no unread conversations displayed in my inbox listing until I hit the 'refresh' link at the top of the inbox. * Searches take ~10 seconds or more. * Sometimes actions start to timeout with a "Loading...", which turns into a "Still Loading..." which sits there for 20 seconds or so before the action goes through. * A couple of times the gchat applet has timed out while the rest of the gmail interface worked fine. A full page refresh didn't fix it (it would continue to timeout while trying to log me in). After a full page reload the GChat app completely disappeared. Even the 'enable/disable gchat' links at the bottom of the page were missing. Once I was able to remedy this by deleting all of my cookies for * .google.com. The second time I had to find a forum post suggesting that I enable the Google Labs feature to move GTalk to the right side of the Gmail interface (which worked). A week later I disabled that hack and the regular version was working again, though sometimes it will timeout. * Sometimes co-workers will appear offline in GTalk even though they aren't. * Sometimes a GTalk conversation will get into a 'wedged' state where it is impossible to close the little popup window (only minimize it). Neither hitting Esc, not clicking the close button/link with the mouse will get rid of it. The only remedy is a full page refresh (which is akin to just re-logging into Gmail; the 'loading' progress bar comes up and everything). It's important to note that sometimes when things start to timeout, it will happen for a period of maybe 5 minutes or so, and then everything is snappy again (this applies only to the Gmail issues, not the GTalk/GChat issues). And during this time none of my co-workers is having any issues. But we all experience the periodic DoS of Gmail (for lack of a better term).

jbooth 16y ago

They mean "Sometimes, almost as slow as the other email providers" -- when someone's the top dog, and they make a minor slip, it's always news for various human reasons. Although I have noticed a little slowdown. Just noticing the higher standards for Google while I'm at it :)

mfukar 16y ago

My worst issue with Gmail at the moment is that I have a label for a mailing list with a good amount of traffic (at least 700 emails a day) and searching, browsing through pages and deleting emails from it takes anywhere from 3 seconds to 3 minutes. In terms of perceived speed and responsiveness alone, even Outlook is faster than Gmail's web interface at the moment.. Also, loading Gmail indeed takes about 20-25 seconds, but that's a small issue for me (yay for one-time costs).

xtho 16y ago

I just tried to send an e-mail. After a few seconds I got tired looking at the "Loading" label, so I switched to html mode. I personally wouldn't say it's slow. I'd rather call it broken.

bad_user 16y ago

I've been having this problem for the past 2 weeks. Before that performance was stellar.

tworats 16y ago

Loading gmail is sometimes relatively fast, sometimes incredibly slow. Search is consistently slow. Displaying a message after clicking on it is sometimes very slow, sometimes ok. Sending messages can take an inordinate amount of time on occasion. Receiving email is still generally reasonably fast, but occasionally a message will take an hour to show up (messages before and after it showing up just fine). Overall it feels quite sluggish, nothing like it was a year ago. The new Yahoo Mail on the other hand is surprisingly fast and slick. Quite a role reversal.