Gmail has become unusably slow

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has-become-unsuably-slow.html

by taylorwc • 16 years ago

203 125 16 years ago

sucuri2• 16 years ago

I was having the exact same problem when my account was using around 85% of the allowed storage.

I also had another account with very little emails stored and it was pretty fast.

My solution (quite lame): I redirected the "full" account to the other one and started to only use the later. So far no more problems...

kbrower• 16 years ago

Would be curious to know if pop and imap are also slow

billturner2• 16 years ago

For me, IMAP is not slow at all. In fact, I almost never have a problem with GMail over IMAP at all - and I have 3 separate email accounts (some under google apps for your domain) that all check every 30 minutes or so).

bshep• 16 years ago

Sometimes I have issues with large attachments using Mail.app through IMAP, but I think its mostly Mail.app messing up or google throttling the connection.

kevinelliott2• 16 years ago

Let's not forget that IMAP clients often queue the connection requests, so that when you hit Send it gives them illusion that it was quick, while it's often still sending in the background.

giangbiscan• 16 years ago

It is for me. Loading takes forever. I gave up, only use web now. Web is fast and good for me though.

nfnaaron2• 16 years ago

Would be curious to know if IMAP is slow for Weinberg specifically. Others report good web experience, and disjoint others report good IMAP experience.

billturner2• 16 years ago

It's so rare that I use the actual GMail interface that I often forget how it even works, or how slow it is. Shortly after GMail allowed IMAP access, I hooked it up to my Mail.app and don't even bother with the web interface. It's so much more convenient, and it's rare that I've have problems when the cries of "GMail is down again" come about.

uptown• 16 years ago

Google says they're aware of the speed issue, that they have a solution, and that they're fixing it.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/

jkincaid• 16 years ago

The Gmail team is most definitely aware of this and a fix is in the works. At SXSW this year there was a panel with four or five Gmail team members and this came up — they said it's related to the size of your inbox, and that it has a lot of Googlers complaining internally too, since many of them have the oldest/large accounts. Also see http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/gmail-slow/, though it has basically the same info.

epi0Bauqu6• 16 years ago

That reference says "slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages."

I only have 50K messages at a little over 4GB. People are saying they have inboxes as full as mine and are still fast.

Something doesn't add up. Is my account on an old infrastructure?

timmaah• 16 years ago

My personal account is using only 648mb and speed has been horrid lately. Most of the time the slowness is in returning back to the inbox. If I get the "Loading" text at the top, it will take ~10 seconds these days.

mattmcknight2• 16 years ago

I have 7.1GB, it's still beyond fast. Size isn't a sufficient condition for whatever problem it is you are seeing. The only time I had a problem was before I abandoned greasemonkey.

Which operations are slow for you?

godDLL• 16 years ago

Fast and slow is subjective. You might be talking about responsiveness of the UI, or a specific feature like search, and someone else might be used to a faster UI, or a faster search.

nethergoat• 16 years ago

Are all 50k messages still in your inbox, or have you archived most of them?

palyndrome• 16 years ago

> Is my account on an old infrastructure?

I'm starting to wonder about that too - I've discussed this with a bunch of people recently, and those of us who are seeing the really awful performance (>30 second wait times for basic operations like sending a mail) seem to be mainly early adopters.

Personally, I'm using Google Apps "Premiere" which I initially purchased about a month after launch.

Vivtek2• 16 years ago

Y'know, this article isn't about Gmail performance nearly as much as it is another article about Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency.

Somebody who goes to a conference might get something like feedback and disseminate it to the masses - but that's it. Google is not interested in hearing about problems, and if they themselves are affected by a problem, well, boy howdy, they're on it - but in any other case, maybe they're on it, maybe they're not. Who are we to ask?

donohoe2• 16 years ago

Don't mistake lack of customer service for 'disdain'. For every issue related to Googles free products and services when have you ever really, and I mean really needed a traditional customer service rep?

Maybe once? Not at all?

I would hate Gmail never to have happened becuase they felt it would require a call center and they were not prepared to do that...

And as for 'transparency'... um, they're a private company. But a very transparent one at that in many other ways. Just not 'transparent' in this one way?

While I'm here...

(1) "Somebody who goes to a conference might get something like feedback and disseminate it to the masses"

I've found the blog helpful (not always, but its still there): http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/whats-your-story.html

(2) "Google is not interested in hearing about problems"

Try this link: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail

(3) "and if they themselves are affected by a problem, well, boy howdy, they're on it"

To be fair, as a dev its much much easier to solve a problem when you experience it first-hand but I maintain that they don't necessarily wait until it happens to them before problems get addressed.

You know, you could be absolutely right in all respects BUT you assume its somehow malicious, or condescending or whatever - when, at worst, its benign.

ern• 16 years ago

A few years ago, I was called in and told that my work machine was pulling huge amounts of data from the net. It eventually turned out that the problem was a buggy version of Google Desktop.

After a fairly intensive search, I found the reason in an obscure Google Groups posting[ http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop_Something-Brok... ]. I experienced the bug six months after the issue was discussed there, and that was the only source of information I could find.

I don't know if Google has improved its support recently, but the obscure way in which information on the bug was disseminated certainly made me more wary of using Google products after that.

andreyf• 16 years ago

Google's utter disdain for our quaint notions of customer service and transparency

Do you really expect GMail to provide personal customer service to its ~176m [1] non-paying users? Run the numbers: if the average user calls in 5 minutes a year (very low estimate), how many hours a day of customer support would it take?

And transparency - are you suggesting they open source their infrastructure so you can hack on BigTable to fix their speed issues?

1. In 2009: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=http:...

wmeredith• 16 years ago

You get what you pay for. End of story.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

being able to sort or search your inbox by size would make resolving this issue on a personal level a heck of a lot easier

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

related to the size of your inbox

I wish there were an easier way to export mail. Probably half my gmail storage consists of mail & attachments from a project I worked on last year where the the other guy absolutely refused to use Google docs or dropbox or any similar solution, and insisted that every revision of every document be transferred via attachment, so that one folder is taking up most of a gigabyte.

I'd love to just zip, burn to DVD, and shelve the data but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to 'archive for export' and then just download it: I have to set up a mail client and transfer it all via IMAP, which will take a whole day :-(

foljs• 16 years ago

Yeah. A whole day.

Or you can go to sleep, and leave it to take A WHOLE NIGHT.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

It continues to amaze me that a company as technically brilliant and pervasive as Google is so spectacularly bad at even rudimentary customer service.

latch• 16 years ago

Really? I don't see the two as being remotely related. In fact, I'm tempted to say that google's technical brilliance is likely the reason for their poor customer service.

What is amazing is that a company as large and with as many products as Google - regardless of its technical prowess - hasn't set up the necessary customer service infrastructure yet.

paulgb• 16 years ago

I think it's also amazing that, in a decade of using many Google products and APIs, I've never needed to contact support.

charlesju• 16 years ago

There is no way Google can scale customer service to be profitable for free services. Gmail at the end of the day is a free service, and you should either (a) pick a different email provider or (b) setup shop yourself if you need that kind of service.

icey2• 16 years ago

Is there any software out there that handles spam as well as Gmail's spam filter?

The rest of the features that Gmail offers seem like they'd be hard to replicate as well - I'm talking about the cool stuff like being able to put arbitrary periods in your email address, or adding +whatever to the end of it.

I really like Gmail today, but if there were a way to replicate all the nice things it does on a server I controlled that would be pretty sweet.

ryandvm• 16 years ago

or (c) pay for a Premier Apps account and get customer service guarantees.

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

ubernostrum• 16 years ago

Most of the complaints I've seen about Google's customer-service, ironically, are from people who are paying customers. So it's not that they provide service to people who pay for it, it's that they don't seem to provide service, period.

kevinelliott2• 16 years ago

The Google AdSense customer support team has been very quick to respond to my inquiries over the years. This is probably attributed to being one of their direcly profiting products, perhaps.

blehn2• 16 years ago

interesting. i guess I have about 7k emails stored in my account. maybe 10 labels. a bunch of labs featues enabled. and everything is usually pretty instant for me. searches never take more than a second or two. There's an occassional hiccup, but nothing really troubling.

using chrome and FF on OSX

epi0Bauqu6• 16 years ago

I have 50,689 messages now, down from ~68K. So I deleted like 18K. Again, it seems ridiculous that I need to delete messages.

However, it is even more ridiculous that if this is the solution that works, Gmail makes it really hard to make it work. There is no way to search for the biggest messages. There is no way to isolate all mailing lists. I can't find a way to search for [ in the subject.

I ended up launching up etacts and otherinbox and looking for people I used to contact years ago (old projects) and deleted emails from those projects.

surki• 16 years ago

Use IMAP access to get & sort messages by size and delete ?

blehn2• 16 years ago

yeah definitely agree -- it shouldn't slow down with more messages if one of the primary selling points is, "never delete another message."

Terretta3• 16 years ago

Also, I haven't found any way to do a search then delete particular messages without deleting the whole conversation.

Anyone know how to do a search w/o pulling in conversations, and/or delete selected search results without deleting whole threads?

At present, I resort to IMAP.

// Over 150,000 messages per mail box, working on my third mail box.

hokkos• 16 years ago

How do you know the total number of message is gmail ?

iamelgringo• 16 years ago

I've been having the exact same problem. I've been playing around with Outlook + Xobni as a possible solution. Xobni is really nice software. It has some killer features that I'd love to have on any webmail client.

Syncing contacts and email with Google apps is an issue, but from what I read, paying GOOG $50 a year solves that problem.

watty• 16 years ago

19k, 3GB, 7 labels and it's speedy for me. Takes a few seconds to search or switch labels.

TwoSheds• 16 years ago

I have 600 MB stuff there, and it certainly beats my corporate Outlook in speed...

pkrumins• 16 years ago

As I was reading your article, I got an idea. Create Duck Duck Mail! Your search engine is awesome, and I bet your mail service would be awesome too!

nlawalker• 16 years ago

Only 730 MB, 11309 messages here, and I can confirm that the service has been steadily slowing over the past three or four weeks. Loading my inbox from scratch can take well over 10 seconds, and I have reproduced this on multiple machines in my home and multiple machines on my corporate network. Starting new emails, sending emails, switching labels, all slow.

pilif• 16 years ago

I have all mail since 2001 (around 80'000 messages) in my google (apps, paid) account. While the web interface is still acceptably fast (as long as I don't browse my All Mail label), but the iphone (and ipad) frontend has become unbearably slow in the last few weeks.

It opens quickly, loads the locally cached page and then it's just spinning and spinning for up to 5 minutes before it either reloads the page completely, signs me out again or finally displays the new mail.

Considering this is a product from a company that places so much importance on speed, this is completely inacceptable, IMHO.

tritowntim• 16 years ago

I had the same problem with the iPhone web UI. Delete the local HTML5 database from Mobile Safari, then kill and restart Mobile Safari, or restart your phone. Once I did this, iPhone web gmail was fast again.

lutorm2• 16 years ago

My android gmail app is just as fast as the web. I have 35k messages, about 1.5gb. The web interface is slowish, but I haven't noticed the phone app being any slower.

rgrove• 16 years ago

I started having this problem with the mobile Gmail interface a few weeks ago too. The solution was to stop using a bookmarked inbox URL. When I use the http://mail.google.com/a/mydomain.com/ URL instead (and go through several redirects to the mobile site), my inbox loads nearly instantly every time.

I have no idea why this is the case, but it solved my problem.

Kilimanjaro• 16 years ago

My only complain is about loading time. It takes forever.

Compared to Google Reader, which loads the UI instantly, then loads the data, I say Gmail should work that way.

Don't let me stare at a white page with a retarded progress bar for a minute.

mgcross2• 16 years ago

I've got <8000 emails at around 2GB. Gmail seems to have been slow for the past couple of weeks, but it does vary. Usually 20-30 seconds to load Gmail; 15-20 seconds to open an email. 30 seconds or more to send.

I just hid chat, buzz and 'web clips'. I also set the theme back to classic. Not sure what did it (or if it was even something I did), but it's back to normal now, even if I turn everything back on.

harry• 16 years ago

Themes caused the most round-about slowdown for me when they were introduced. I haven't gone back to using any theme sense and I get fast speeds on a 5k msg account.

Also - Hooray for a free, fantastic email service. Thanks google!

ireadzalot• 16 years ago

I am running at 42% of storage. What I do is archive my messages every couple of weeks. I have noticed it always helps.

melling• 16 years ago

A few months ago my gmail was slow I deleted my mail down from 23k msgs to under 1000. I nuke all unstarred msgs from mailing lists, etc. Seemed to help. Although still not lightning fast (like the Chrome browser :-)).

scdlbx• 16 years ago

I'm using over 5200MB, over 90,000 messages and 54 labels and haven't noticed any speed problems. Though the majority of my messages are archived, with only ~6000 in my inbox.

rmorrison• 16 years ago

I definitely think there is room in the market for a new, online, paid email client. One that can connect to multiple outside accounts like Outlook, "infinite" storage, emphasis on privacy, gmail-style user interface, regular backups, and solid customer support. Email is extremely important to people and they don't want to worry about it. I wouldn't mind paying for a reliable and secure email client in the cloud.

qeorge2• 16 years ago

FWIW, we used hosted Exchange from MS: http://microsoft.com/online/

Its $5/user/month, 25GB storage, great webmail client, and hands down the best support I've ever gotten.

mnemonik• 16 years ago

Whoah, whoah whoah!

We have hosted Exchange at my university. The Outlook web client is perhaps the worst piece of software I am forced to use on a regular basis.

The calendaring is completely useless on the web client. I can't see anyone else's schedules so when I make meetings with them, its like shooting a rifle blind folded. I have to do a "guess and check" method where if Outlook vomits in my face and says someone is busy at that scheduled time, I just guess for the next time slot till eventually one fits.

We don't have nearly as much space as you do, so I am forced to completely delete all my messages 4 times a year to free up space. The UI makes this task such a pain (admittedly it is the uni's fault for not forking up enough $$ for enough space, but it is incredibly time wasting and difficult through the web client).

Do I get some sort of notification when my inbox is full? No. Only, I stop receiving emails and every would be sender gets a message that my inbox is full. This continues until someone I meet in person tells me that they haven't been able to communicate with me online for the larger part of the week. No way to get those emails back.

Oh, and all this is after I forward all my messages to gmail and never use Outlook unless I am forced to.

(Sorry, just venting and getting this off my chest.)

gojomo• 16 years ago

In a last ditch effort, I bought some extra storage from Google thinking maybe I'd get some kind of premium level service. So far, no.

Ah, to be Google! Your competitors, when frustrated by your poor service and unclear communications, send you more money in the vain hope it might help.

scorpion032• 16 years ago

Now, That's a clever catch!

phreanix3• 16 years ago

I also noticed that Google Apps (docs, etc.) really spikes my processor load. Anybody else experiencing this?

strebler• 16 years ago

Google docs has been doing that for me for a few months, I found that if I close the main docs screen after opening a document (in a new window), it usually fixes the problem.

phreanix3• 16 years ago

Thanks, I might have discovered that too, but I lost track of which fix worked lol.

orblivion• 16 years ago

I had enough and switched back to the "Older Version". It's not bad that way.

dalore• 16 years ago

Yet another reason to jump on the GTD bandwagon and have a 0 emails in your inbox policy.

webwright• 16 years ago

Time for DuckDuckEmail, I say! :-)

jodrellblank2• 16 years ago

I'd be tempted to design a "Never delete email again! We autodelete all email 10 days after receipt! Mandatory!" service.

It would be able to be cheap/free/low infrastructure by not needing masses of storage, and stay fast by not needing to handle tens of thousands of mails. And it wouldn't need a complex UI or tagging/labelling/tabbing/folders.

Also it would encourage / enforce dealing with mails and getting the information of of your mailbox and putting it wherever it needs to be.

It would also probably need to have a tie-in with some persona wiki and dropbox so you could easily shunt relevant content that you need to keep.

I think many people would find that they just don't need most old email and wouldn't miss it. The panic of "I have it around somewhere, let me spend time searching ... I think Bob sent it to me one time" is replaced by the certainty of "I don't have it".

If email was physical stuff, we'd call email archiving a hording disorder.

kilps• 16 years ago

As an aside; is there a web based email service/client comparable to gmail? More particularly is there one which handles conversation view as well as gmail does? Until there is then gmail has a bit of a monopoly on users like me who love the client and everything that sets it apart from traditional email.

mgcross2• 16 years ago

Zimbra threads messages and offers the best webmail I've found outside of Gmail. Definitely feels more sluggish than Gmail though.

curiousfiddler• 16 years ago

I think you've got to see this video really:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk&feature=relat...

I think gmail is a fabulous product (imagine emails before gmail) and like every other agile product, it has its problems. The fact that we don't have to spend "any" money for storing gigs of our data on a secure and safe platform is probably enough for me to use it.

papachito• 16 years ago

It's still very fast here.

vhawk• 16 years ago

it'sachingly slow here in england, not so bad on IE but dreadsful on firefox

stef252• 16 years ago

It was extremely slow for me for a couple of days (so slow it was unusable) but then it fixed itself. Seemed more like a temporary issue or bug than something related to inbox size.

elight• 16 years ago

Serioously and i thought that it was just me. I'm so glad to have found GMail Users Not-so-anonymous!

emehrkay• 16 years ago

My account was deactivated today for no apparent reason. It allowed me to reactive it by giving them my phone number. What's good Google?

coned88• 16 years ago

I stopped using gmail a while ago. I use lavabit now and its so much better.

tybris• 16 years ago

Well, at least it works. When I open it in Chrome I get:

The webpage at https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail... has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

(and of course, clearing cookies does not work)

Jeema3000• 16 years ago

"Gmail has become unusably slow"

If it's that bad, then it begs the question: why do you continue to use it? There's plenty of alternatives. Vote with your feet and let them know.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

Browsing mail is still adequately fast for me; I have 33k threads and I don't have any problem loading up labels or switching back and forth from inbox to any other thing. I'm using 2GB of space.

I did find the search slow and inadequate though, so I downloaded and indexed all of my messages with Thunderbird and just use that when I want to search for something. I need to do an export to a conventional mbox or something soon, too.

Gmail has become unusably slow

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