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Comment by hackernews1134 | Hacker News Reader

4:41AM PT, Google services have been restored to my accounts (free & gsuite).

And I have never seen them load so fast before - gmail progress bar barely seen for a fraction of a second whereas I am more used to seeing it for multiple seconds (2-3 sec) until it loads.

I observe the same anecdotal speedup for other sites... drive, youtube, calendar. I wonder if they are throwing all the hardware they have at their services or I am encountering underutilized servers since it is not fixed for everyone.

It is nice to experience (even if it is short lived) the snappiness of Google services if they weren't so multi-tenented.

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If this phenomenon is actually real instead of just perception then I'd guess it is down to reduced demand of some short. Some possibilities:

a) users haven't all come back yet b) Google is throttling how fast users can access services again to prevent further outages c) to reduce load, apps have features turned off (which might make things directly faster on the user's end or just reduce load on the server side)

At Google's scale, I'd expect it to be all of the above.

I hope they make their learnings, post-mortem, etc. public so that we can all learn from it.

My engineer hat is saying - "damn, I wish I was part of fixing this outage at their scale."

My product owner hat is saying - "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa......Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...."

Everything is snappier for a while if you turn it off and then on again

Except when there is no cache warming when you turn it on

Except when there is cache warming when you turn it on?

I would guess autoscaling kicked in (RPC error rate caused higher CPU usage?) and now things will scale back down again.

Perhaps they rebooted their clusters and it flushed the memory ???.

Oh man, you're right. Bloated gmail loaded instantly. What's going on? It's loading almost 2x to 3x faster.

Isn't this a good indication that the performance problem if gmail may not be related to the "bloat" of the frontend itself?

It might suggest that the frontend isn't the only issue, at least - and maybe this explains why it's usually so slow, if the frontend can be fast on a fast enough backend. On the other hand, the speed of the "basic HTML" version implies that the frontend can be the issue.

Entirely possible as well that the "basic HTML" uses different API service in the background that are snappier for comparative lack of users.

I always thought gmail being slow is because of me using firefox but now it's surprisingly snappy. What the hell is going on?

Wow, it's faster in firefox than it used to be in chrome... while in chrome it's almost isntanteneous

I wish it was always like this. I hate how slow YouTube, Gmail, etc. often are normally.

I wonder if they just killed the affected service so it's loading faster-than-usual now

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