18 replies to this topic

[Gaurish]

Quote

A need for speed: the path to a faster loading sequence
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 9:48 AM
Posted by Wiltse Carpenter, Tech Lead, Gmail Performance

Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it's something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster. Gmail's 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.

Full post via Official Google Blog

Lot of tech info given but they are trying to say that Gmail is been more lighter & therefore faster


But did you guys notice the change;)
Honestly, i didn't
what about you guys?

[Ashish.K]

Nor did i noticed any changes, may be we are too use to of the fast mails :P

I do noticed the increased mailbox size i.e > 6 GB i assume

[whatsinaname]

I've personally found gmail to be really really fast on firefox 3 beta. (I switched from Opera recently). Don't know if I'll notice any difference.

[Renegade]

:D ask someone who has been accessing internet on gprs for the last 45 days. I can say that it loads in one go now since a few days. Earlier I had to refresh it several times before it used to load and that too in html mode.

Could be that or could be my gprs has improved. :P

[Dinesh_Malhotra]

i am gettin constant errors onle while openin gmail :(

[Blugene]

I could notice the change in faster loading times...earlier when my dnlds are in full swing it used to take a lot of time to load...but tonight it was working very fast even when downloads were running...plus in our office also i always used to get the HTML version..but since this morning it was loading nicely.

So definitely, there has been substantial improvements in gmail i'd say.

[Ashish.K]

Quote

A couple of the things they did were:

* Spriting - combining all the small graphics into a single image and using CSS background image placement to split out the individual icons.
* Request pooling - Combining together seperate XHR requests into a single large request and then parsing out the results.
* Cacheing - making more of the resource requests cacheable by the browser (JavaScript, CSS etc). That way when the user reloads the page, it doesn’t need to download the same resources over and over.

To help them with this task they used proxy trace tools like Fiddler, WireShark, and HTTPWatch. I think Firebug would have been a good option here too. Other things they could have done (and may have) are:

* GZip compression - compressing all your static resources with ZIP making them much smaller to transmit. This works on all major browsers these days.
* Conbining JS and CSS resources - By concatenating all your JavaScript and CSS resources into one, you reduce the number of requests needed and really speed up your site.

Source of the information

[Vij]

Interesting... So its faster now.
Btw whats "more faster"...:P

[RiO]

The whole world is on dope.

[whatsinaname]

vij said:

Interesting... So its faster now.
Btw whats "more faster"...:P

It just means that now Gmail's speed goes up to *drumroll* 11.:P

[Rahul++]

i didn't feel any booster :P but slightly...

[idea]

it is faster...

[RiO]

Rahulrulez said:

i didn't feel any booster :P but slightly...

That's the drugs slowly kicking in...

[Vandal]

Didn't notice. And gmail has been progressively getting slower the past couple of years...

^^ More faster = faster. There's no such thing as "more faster"

[KingKrool]

Actually, everyone in the US seems to find it slower... I wonder whether their changes affect latency or throughput or both...

[Gaurish]

I can see the Progress Bar, which is nice welcome Addition.

[Anish]

Certainly quicker on the Plug2Surf modem on my notebook.

I think they've optimised it for slower connections, so dialup/wireless/EDGe users will find it quick, not those on Broadband/Cable connections.

@ Rio - Lol!

[The Sorcerer]

Same here. I am getting way better loading with tata indicom's plug2surf.

[SharekhaN]

it is definitely much faster than before.