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0 pointshackernews11345y ago0 comments

4:41AM PT, Google services have been restored to my accounts (free & gsuite).

And I have never seen them load so fast before - gmail progress bar barely seen for a fraction of a second whereas I am more used to seeing it for multiple seconds (2-3 sec) until it loads.

I observe the same anecdotal speedup for other sites... drive, youtube, calendar. I wonder if they are throwing all the hardware they have at their services or I am encountering underutilized servers since it is not fixed for everyone.

It is nice to experience (even if it is short lived) the snappiness of Google services if they weren't so multi-tenented.

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14 comments · 7 top-level

rubatuga5y ago· 4 in thread

Oh man, you're right. Bloated gmail loaded instantly. What's going on? It's loading almost 2x to 3x faster.

ithkuil5y ago

Isn't this a good indication that the performance problem if gmail may not be related to the "bloat" of the frontend itself?

yjftsjthsd-h5y ago

It might suggest that the frontend isn't the only issue, at least - and maybe this explains why it's usually so slow, if the frontend can be fast on a fast enough backend. On the other hand, the speed of the "basic HTML" version implies that the frontend can be the issue.

1 more reply

fleaaa5y ago

I always thought gmail being slow is because of me using firefox but now it's surprisingly snappy. What the hell is going on?

proto-n5y ago

Wow, it's faster in firefox than it used to be in chrome... while in chrome it's almost isntanteneous

orzig5y ago· 2 in thread

Everything is snappier for a while if you turn it off and then on again

faeyanpiraat5y ago

Except when there is no cache warming when you turn it on

nhlx25y ago

Except when there is cache warming when you turn it on?

cranekam5y ago· 1 in thread

If this phenomenon is actually real instead of just perception then I'd guess it is down to reduced demand of some short. Some possibilities:

a) users haven't all come back yet b) Google is throttling how fast users can access services again to prevent further outages c) to reduce load, apps have features turned off (which might make things directly faster on the user's end or just reduce load on the server side)

hackernews1134OP5y ago

At Google's scale, I'd expect it to be all of the above.

I hope they make their learnings, post-mortem, etc. public so that we can all learn from it.

My engineer hat is saying - "damn, I wish I was part of fixing this outage at their scale."

My product owner hat is saying - "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa......Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...."

q3k5y ago

I would guess autoscaling kicked in (RPC error rate caused higher CPU usage?) and now things will scale back down again.

tibbydudeza5y ago

Perhaps they rebooted their clusters and it flushed the memory ???.

Tenoke5y ago

I wish it was always like this. I hate how slow YouTube, Gmail, etc. often are normally.

roadnottaken5y ago

I wonder if they just killed the affected service so it's loading faster-than-usual now

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