Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

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> 1 work email on Google Apps at 10GB, 1 personal on normal Gmail at 3GB

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 have about 2.5 million emails in my work account and it still works really well, as a counter example. (I work at Google, on Gmail backend).

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

I have a free Google Apps account with ~2GB of mail.

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.

Are you using an IMAP client? I think it can have the same effect as connected apps.

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