Official Gmail Blog: A need for speed: the path to a faster loading sequence
We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster. Gmails architecture eliminates many of the delays in reading mail by employing techniques like prefetching, but recently we decided to take a close look at some other key parts of Gmail to see if we could speed things up.
So much so that I recently went into the settings and changed maximum threads per page from 50 to 25. I also tried the basic html version. It is too frustrating.
Gmail team: why not give us a clock?
When I was at LexisNexis, I was product manager for the web version of Lexis, and we spent a tremendous amount of time on performance improvement. As the gmail team’s post suggests, it is very hard work.It’s hard to tell what’s even happening without extensive experimentation and instrumentation, and then when you make changes, there are always people who see zero or negative improvement. I feel for the gmail team, but I have to be honest — gmail really does seem slower to me.
I wonder if gmail has advertently or inadvertently taken a step away from managed performance. When I was at LexisNexis, we were absolutelly appalled to learn that the backend search engine had a “governor” on it which slowed down any search that came back too fast. The idea was to manage customer experience by making every search take the same amount of time, no matter whether it was busy time or not. Perception is reality: it’s important whether response time is consistent.
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