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Google Working to Make Gmail Faster

- By - Source : Tom's Guide US

Google is fixing the Gmail lag.

For power users of the Gmail service, things will get a lot faster in the near future. The promise was made Sunday during the Behind the Scenes of Gmail panel held at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

Google's Gmail is currently the third most-used online email service in the nation, trailing behind Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail, both of which have been around for more than a decade. While Gmail is the youngest of the three and maintains "hundreds of millions" of users, it's also notably lagging in overall performance.

During the festival, Google's team was asked why the online email service was so slow. In response, team member Johnathan Perlow took a poll from the audience, asking those who suffer Gmail lag to raise their hand. According to TechCrunch, a "solid number of people" raised their hands, but not everyone.

Perlow then said that-- using the audience as an example-- the slowness is really only a big issue with power users who have thousands of messages, or are approaching 100-percent usage of the Gmail inbox.

But Perlow also said that Google is definitely aware of the performance issue. He told the audience that a fix is in the works, however no additional details were provided.

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mianmian 03/15/2010 10:38 PM
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-20+

I did not feel the slowness yet. But faster never hurt.

bhaberle 03/15/2010 10:59 PM
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-7+

mianmian :
I did not feel the slowness yet. But faster never hurt.



Agreed

micr0be 03/15/2010 11:02 PM
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Cy-Kill 03/15/2010 11:16 PM
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-14+

Since they added Buzz, I've found Gmail to have gotten slower! Has anyone else notice this?!

orionantares 03/15/2010 11:28 PM
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I don't use Buzz. They seem to believe that the slowness is related to the amount of storage space used. I don't use a lot of the space I have and I have not had any issues with speed. From my point of view their assessment may be correct.

Anonymous 03/15/2010 11:34 PM
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I switched to Gmail because I found it loaded quite a bit faster than hotmail. I have to use satellite internet fairly often which is pretty slow and I found hotmail would take forever to load (if it would load at all) whereas Gmail seemed a lot more lightweight and loaded quite a bit faster (even without kicking it into HTML mode)

gm0n3y 03/15/2010 11:48 PM
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-13+

Hmm, gmail seems way faster than my hotmail account. Its always been virtually instantaneous for me.

Clintonio 03/16/2010 12:14 PM
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lightion :
I switched to Gmail because I found it loaded quite a bit faster than hotmail. I have to use satellite internet fairly often which is pretty slow and I found hotmail would take forever to load (if it would load at all) whereas Gmail seemed a lot more lightweight and loaded quite a bit faster (even without kicking it into HTML mode)



This is probably Javascript and AJAX speed issues rather than bandwidth issues. My mobile phone and laptop both load up Gmail inbox,it takes my phone 3 minutes and my laptop 3 seconds on the same connection. Hotmail is a lot more bandwidth intensive and slow from my experience too!

Anonymous 03/16/2010 12:31 PM
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awesomeeeeeeeeeee. i wonder how this affects mobile devices.

ChrisCornell 03/16/2010 2:03 AM
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Even on my HTC phone, G-mail is faster than Hotmail on a regular computer...
Well thumbs up anyway Google :)

JohnnyLucky 03/16/2010 4:34 AM
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I didn't know there was a lag issue.

alabasterboy 03/16/2010 9:48 AM
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^this

cheepstuff 03/16/2010 6:14 PM
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gmail only takes a second to load for me...

grieve 03/16/2010 7:15 PM
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I have not noticed any lag.

I hate in Gmail that all the messages of a string stick together...I wish there was an option to stop that and see the emails as individual. I actually hate it!

kittle 03/16/2010 7:37 PM
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gmail page loads are fine here - but just trying to type a reply can be an exercise in frustration with my text being laggy. If they can fix that, i'll be very happy.

Ryric 03/17/2010 6:26 PM
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10% and its typically fine. Occasional slowness, but I tend to attribute that to internet connectivity rather then google.