Gmail as a Facade
jackg.org
jackg.org
I work on the Gmail backend team and we regularly see blogs go by such as this one. The vast majority of the times that prominent bloggers report slowness it's because they do have tons of apps polling their account via IMAP or other sync methods. All of these apps end up competing for resources to your account with the web UI and thus you experience slowness.
Internally we have accounts with upwards of 100G of mail still being very usable, so we know Gmail scales. Also we have quite a few people internally focusing specifically on finding and fixing these types of problems so that eventually it won't matter how many clients you have or how large your mailbox is, but these things take time. Gmail is a huge ship, we can't turn on a dime.
So yeah, check that IssuedAuthSubTokens page and revoke access to any random services that you've tried out and forgot about.
Hope that helps. -Andrew
But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely unusable.
As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues.
Hope that helps,
-Andrew
Suggestion:
Why not give the UI interface priority over other polls (allocate more bandwidth to it) for 5-10 minute chunks when its active?
The reason that it's not that straightforward is that lots of operations change state in your account, so you need proper ordering of requests for everything that comes in if you want to ensure consistency. Furthermore when you do a UI operation you want it to happen now, and anything longer than that is frustrating. But if there is a large IMAP operation in the background, we can't just pre-empt that and re-start it because it might have already modified some state, not all changes are idempotent. So you have to wait, and you experience slowness.
Add in message delivery, various background operations for different features, android sync, different third-party add-ons that hit via IMAP or other sync protocols, and a stack that is more than a few layers deep and it gets very complex, very fast.
Hope that helps,
-Andrew
Any pointer would be much appreciated. Thanks!
One of our support folks should be emailing you and they'll help debug where the slowness lies, on our side or through some other interaction. If it's a bug, we'll fix it up shortly.
The first appearance was cool, it was distinctive and unique. A breath of fresh air, even. But now it seems like a third of the links I hit from HN are Svbtlr blogs; it's starting to feel as generic and indistinguishable as last year's Wordpress theme.
*awaits downvotes from Objectivists
Pot, kettle, incidentally. Compare parent's "I immediately lose a bit of respect" with your "you're an absolutist who [...]" The latter makes a much broader claim based on a similarly small piece of information.
But I agree that the plot and characters are shallow. The book was designed to showcase her philosophy and it does it well. I don't believe it was ever intended to be realistic, and I think it fell a little short of being entertaining a lot of the time. It was far too long. It was still far better than a lot of other fiction books I've read.
What I get out of the book (which I've read 3 times) is a different look on self-worth and self-sacrifice than all the rest of society gives. I believe people would be better off if everyone acted in a rational manner to promote their own interests. (It's not actually rational to hurt others to promote yourself. In the long run, that's a losing strategy.) I also believe that this will never actually happen, and so compromises are in order.
I believe that book has helped me form a better sense of my own worth, and was at least partially responsible for me leaving a job and getting a 40% raise at the next one. It's not the only factor, but it helped to be able to objectively assess my value to the company, as well as how much I value my own time.
Does that mean I'm a card-carrying Objectivist who doesn't give to charity? No. It means I'm a more rational person who evaluates things a little more clearly. In fact, I actually give to charity more now than before, so the book can hardly be said to have hurt that. I do give for slightly different reasons now, though. Before, I gave because it was the thing to do. Now, I give because I want that charity to work. If I give to the Red Cross, it's because I want them to help sick or hurt people. If I give to Child's Play, it's because I want sick children to find a little bit of joy in their lives. Those things may seem obvious, but they weren't.
A good example is United Way. I don't give to them. Why? Because all they do is slice off a large percent (13% apparently) and give the rest to an actual charity. Before, I had never really considered this, and just bought into their propaganda.
"Of each dollar United Way collects, over 87 cents goes directly to valuable community services. " - http://www.forsythunitedway.org/faq.cfm
They used to be very vocal about how much went to a real charity, pushing that statistic in front of you like it was a good thing. That is not good. That 13% could be going to a real charity, too, and actually helping people.
So in the end, don't lose respect for people merely because they like something. You might not be seeing the whole story.
Just a hint: there might be other reasons than "that's a losing strategy" to avoid hurting others to promote yourself.
Which is what I said.
And I lose a bit of respect because her philosophy is terrible, she's basically a sociopath; the book and her philosophy entirely lack empathy.
> What I get out of the book is a different look on self-worth and self-sacrifice than all the rest of society gives.
Because society doesn't normally promote sociopathy.
If you took something good from it and didn't come out admiring the objectivist view, good for you, you're the rare exception, but the fact is nearly everyone I've ever met who likes that book likes it because they like the objectivist view and all think they're the John Gaults of the word. Rand makes them feel good about their complete lack of empathy and this book is an excellent thermometer for me to quickly avoid wasting time getting to know people I'm very likely not going to get along with anyway.
BTW, here's my favorite comment on Atlas Shrugged, starring Bob the Angry Flower: http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
That said, many people, including Rand supporters would agree that as a work of fiction it's mostly a thin structure to put forth Rand's ideas. It could almost be a collection of essays, as the book is a collection of monologues and improbable conversations with very little time devoted to character development.
That said, lots of books with big societal ideas tend to have these issues but Rand is particularly ham fisted. Reading Atlas shrugged one gets the impression that she set out to write a novel but kept meandering onto the editorial page. By way of comparison, 1984 is a book with big ideas about society that are more subtly expressed (though Orwell can get preachy as well).
To reveal my own bias, I find her point of view a rather flimsy sort of egotism. It's the internal narrative of the tortured, misunderstood genius projected out to society at large. The galling thing about Rand's writings is the complete lack of understanding or compassion wrt the structural causes of inequity in society. It's a heavy handed, hateful, and facile way to view the world once put under a lens.
This seeming swap is surely, in part, the result of me not looking very closely at the logo. But it might also be a consequence of how de-emphasized the few touches of individuality are in the Svbtle scheme. I don't think "I'm at [author]'s site" when I hit one, I think "oh another Svtble site". It could probably even be fixed pretty easily by filling the whole sidebar with the color and having the white logo float in that, thus giving the brain an actual silhouette to parse out of the corner of my eye instead of 'uh it's a circle and there's something in it I dunno hey look at all this important text over here'.
YMMV, of course.
It's a fun mental exercise to temporarily adopt an extreme viewpoint and think it through to its logical conclusion.
If that's all the guy said, you are being too judgmental too quickly.
Non-copycat examples:
http://osclass.org/ http://asilofis.net/ http://hyperboria.net/
Obviously you don't have this problem on Google+ and Facebook, you know you're on a different user's profile each time because you find the face first.
But maybe they don't care. I personally don't care if I can't tell them apart because I'll only look at the ID if they write something that interests me and those chances are incredibly low.
I have two Gmail accounts - 1 work email on Google Apps at 10GB, 1 personal on normal Gmail at 3GB. Can't see any performance differences. Are others experiencing this?
My account experiences the slowness the OP describes:
- Seconds to open a conversation, often punctuated with messages indicating that the operation failed and must be retried.
- Sending mails fails, and must be retried multiple times.
- Delays correlate loosely with US workdays (I'm in the US). Performance is consistently better at 1AM EST than at 2PM EST.
- 0 connected apps.
I haven't done extensive comparison to other accounts, but I believe that the number of messages is a cause of sluggishness. My mailboxes are > 120k messages. This causes problems with many mail clients; for instance, Sparrow (iPhone or OS X) is useless.
I'm surprised that the GMail team hasn't figured out how to handle busy mail users, given the propaganda that all Google users use GMail. I'd love to have the option to pay for Day 1 performance in my GMail boxes.
I definitely saw the same symptoms for quite a while, which eventually got to the point of serious downtime last year. At some point, the last big downtime (over a day!) involved some sort of transfer to different infrastructure (and I wish I could remember the exact wording now), and since then it's been back to lightning fast.
There definitely seem to be some endemic issues, but they're only for certain slices of users, it seems.
If you've debugged it yourself and can't get to a good resolution (which it looks like you have), please post in our help forums. There are a few people that are dedicated to reading the forum and helping users, and when they hit dead ends for various reasons they'll escalate to the backend team directly and we investigate and fix the account if there is a bug.
Gmail tends to work very well for heavy users, but as with all complex software there are edge cases. Sometimes people fall into those edges and if you escalate through the help forums we'll see a rise in specific types of user escalations and fix whatever bug is causing it.
Hope that helps, -Andrew
Come to think of it, I haven't actually checked if it got my emails correctly :) I should probably reg a throwaway GMail and see if I can clone my current mailbox.
There were some issues with search before that (no other part was slow though), but that went away over time.
No pop account in hotmail, effectively every read message still appears unread in the online email client. By default hotmail had an option checked to "leaving only 14 days of email online". All the rest was virtually deleted and therefore existed only on my computer. There was an insane plugin to submit those all back to inbox without disturbing dates or subjects. However, that only resulted in hotmail access being revoked after 150 or so emails since there is some sort of cap on pushing emails at once to your account. The gmail contacts and email search resembles that of google as a search engine. No other comes near.
Still there is a lot of opportunity to improve this. PG wrote a list of top ten products in which search was first and email was second. Sparrow might have been a good effort. Let's see when it evolves further.
On a sidenote: The speed issues were not the reason for dumping gmail. Over the years my email address has caught the attention of too many spammers. Additionally I wanted to have my emails on one of my own boxes, not with Google.
It now seems to achieve this by using ocsp.thawte.com. Not sure how that works, I can't see any HTTP or HTTPS fetches from youtube during gmail login, yet it still manages to set a third party cookie. Can OCSP do this?
I know with Dovecot without proper (and properly stored... not on NFS) index files, after about 9-10gigs of storage, IMAP and IMAP related tasks became super slowwwww.
Map/reduce probably gets a heck of workout, imagine their entire global database size, it must be staggering.
Maybe they can fix it by periodically rewriting the entire dataset for a single user onto a cluster that is much closer together. Once a year?