Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back | Hacker News Reader

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

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103 pointsssclafani69 comments

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.

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.

“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.

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...

Do you think that the increase in latency for fetching new emails is correlated to the increase in labels used in gmail?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

I run into these issues with only 400Mb in my work account.

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.

Searching in Thunderbird takes forever, sometimes > 30 seconds. Searching in Gmail takes < 1 second. This is why I use a web client.

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.

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.

Searching in Mac OS X's Mail.app is instantaneous, because the message content and metadata are already included in your Spotlight database.

For me its searches and UI. Some searches take upwards of 20 seconds. Messages take 2-3 seconds to open. Just overall slugishness

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.

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.

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

* 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).

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 :)

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).

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.

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

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.

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... [2] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail-is-fast...

Empirically: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cm...

Statistically: 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 )

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.

um...the trends in both of those data sets can be attributed to increasing market share/user base of Gmail over that time.

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.

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=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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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 would be misleading because all they show is that more people are using GMail ;)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Why all of the sudden? Upgrade regression?

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

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.

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 ?

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

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

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