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Gmail has become unusably slow

gabrielweinberg.com

51–60 of 138 posts

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#51
post #25

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 completel…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#52
post #25

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 completel…

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.

yeah. for at most one day. Then it's back to the old level of speed. Unfortunately.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#53
post #43
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

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.…

I'm sorry, but even though I've never needed Google support for Gmail, that doesn't excuse their lack of it.

If they want to be taken seriously, or considered at all for real enterprise app replacement with Gmail or Google docs, they need to have a real live phone support, 1-800 number that lusers can call to get someone that will try to help them.

Let me give you a terrible example: I sync my Exchange calendar with Google Calendar so I can get it on my mobile devices. As I work for a large Fortune 15-20 company, one of my meetings was a weekly recurring meeting with 2,000+ participants. This is not unusual as our quarterly all employees meeting requests are sent out to 50,000+ participants.

This recurring meeting with only 2,000+ participants was cancelled, but I was completely unable to remove it from my Google Calendar. Google Calendar is broken, and after searching online for about an hour for a solution, I found many other people have the same exact issue.

So, here I am with a recurring event in my Google Calendar that I cannot delete: An error has occurred. Please try again later. - this is the level of support I get from Google.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=51...

Basically, search the forums and find the bug has existed since 2009, and no communication from Google about fixing it. Do they really expect to be taken seriously in the enterprise space?

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#54
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contro…

Out of curiosity, why? Does your cost calculation include opportunity cost of time? If Google does it well, why would you want to spend your time on duplicating that instead of spending your time on your own original skill?

Mostly because I want to see how it works.

That and I can't shake the fear that one day my Google account will be locked for some mysterious reason and I'll be stuck without any of my email until I can figure out how to get it turned back on.

I don't have the advantage of being a blogger, and that seems to be the only reliable way to get customer service from Google.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Gmail's web interface would do that too. It's not like it just blocks with a white page while it waits to send.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#56
post #43
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

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.…

[comments]

" ... um, they're a private company. ..."

Screeeeeeech! http://www.google.com/finance?q=goog

[comments]

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#57
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly this. And I hope Google doesn't shift to making a customer service infrastructure take much more of their time than it already does. I mean, think about a 'problem' explanation like this post: "My e-mail is running slower than it used to, and other people with a similar usage profile aren't having the same problem." It's hard to get much more vague than that without trying. I really don't want someone to have…

My experience (google docs API problem), was that I could provide sample code that looked like it ought to work, but actually triggered an internal server error from google, was on a paid support contract, and it wasn't resolved for about 9 months, with months often passing between google responses to my email on the subject.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#58
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I'm sorry, but even though I've never needed Google support for Gmail, that doesn't excuse their lack of it. If they want to be taken seriously, or considered at all for real enterprise app replacement with Gmail or Google docs, they need to have a real live phone support, 1-800 number that lusers can call to get someone that will try to help them. Let me give you a terrible example: I sync my Exchange calendar with…

If you are running Gmail through google apps for enterprises, then you do have customer support options. Of course, then you also pay.

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#59
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 :-)).

Re: Gmail has become unusably slow

#60
post #25

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 completel…

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.
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