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If your gmail is slow there is a simple and effective solution. I've had gmail for years and actually pay for my google apps account. Like the author I assumed

If your gmail is slow there is a simple and effective solution. I've had gmail for years and actually pay for my google apps account. Like the author I assumed my growing mailbox size and filters were the reason for the increasing slowness. So I contacted support and after some investigation they noticed that I had tons of polling requests that were slowing down my account from connected apps (think greplin). They suggested I remove them. I was skeptical, but I did. Immediately gmail was BLAZING fast again. If your gmail or google apps is slow I highly recommend removing all connected apps ASAP: https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens

kkwok 14y ago
Wow. Even if this doesn't speed it up, it's scary how many connected apps I had that I'd forgotten about.
jim-greer 14y ago
I don't really understand why 3rd party apps making requests to their servers would slow down your mail.
hurstdog 14y ago
I was coming to this page just to post a comment like yours above. Thanks for doing that. I work on the Gmail backend team and we regularly see blogs go by such as this one. The vast majority of the times that prominent bloggers report slowness it's because they do have tons of apps polling their account via IMAP or other sync methods. All of these apps end up competing for resources to your account with the web UI and thus you experience slowness. Internally we have accounts with upwards of 100G of mail still being very usable, so we know Gmail scales. Also we have quite a few people internally focusing specifically on finding and fixing these types of problems so that eventually it won't matter how many clients you have or how large your mailbox is, but these things take time. Gmail is a huge ship, we can't turn on a dime. So yeah, check that IssuedAuthSubTokens page and revoke access to any random services that you've tried out and forgot about. Hope that helps. -Andrew
- zx2c4 14y ago
  Sorry, but this isn't the case for me. IssuedAuthSubTokens shows a google talk authorization (bitlbee...), google calendar, and chrome. But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely unusable.
  - hurstdog 14y ago
    I'm sorry that trick isn't working for you. As you mention LKML causes slowdown, it's possible that you're getting an inordinate amount of mail. It's also possible you've got an agressive IMAP client that isn't using one of those auth tokens (another common slowdown cause). As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues. Hope that helps, -Andrew * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100
- zaptheimpaler 14y ago
  The response is much appreciated! Suggestion: Why not give the UI interface priority over other polls (allocate more bandwidth to it) for 5-10 minute chunks when its active?
  - hurstdog 14y ago
    There are people working on those sorts of improvements, but it's not that straightforward so it takes time to get it right. The reason that it's not that straightforward is that lots of operations change state in your account, so you need proper ordering of requests for everything that comes in if you want to ensure consistency. Furthermore when you do a UI operation you want it to happen now, and anything longer than that is frustrating. But if there is a large IMAP operation in the background, we can't just pre-empt that and re-start it because it might have already modified some state, not all changes are idempotent. So you have to wait, and you experience slowness. Add in message delivery, various background operations for different features, android sync, different third-party add-ons that hit via IMAP or other sync protocols, and a stack that is more than a few layers deep and it gets very complex, very fast. Hope that helps, -Andrew
bobbles 14y ago
Wow, thanks for that tip. I don't even use my gmail THAT often, but removing the connected apps I don't use has basically made opening my GMail instant (it would take a few seconds on the 'loading' bar previously)
- Hurdy 14y ago
  That's probably just because everything is cached now. Connected apps can't make loading slower.

kkwok 14y ago

Wow. Even if this doesn't speed it up, it's scary how many connected apps I had that I'd forgotten about.

jim-greer 14y ago

I don't really understand why 3rd party apps making requests to their servers would slow down your mail.

hurstdog 14y ago

I was coming to this page just to post a comment like yours above. Thanks for doing that. I work on the Gmail backend team and we regularly see blogs go by such as this one. The vast majority of the times that prominent bloggers report slowness it's because they do have tons of apps polling their account via IMAP or other sync methods. All of these apps end up competing for resources to your account with the web UI and thus you experience slowness. Internally we have accounts with upwards of 100G of mail still being very usable, so we know Gmail scales. Also we have quite a few people internally focusing specifically on finding and fixing these types of problems so that eventually it won't matter how many clients you have or how large your mailbox is, but these things take time. Gmail is a huge ship, we can't turn on a dime. So yeah, check that IssuedAuthSubTokens page and revoke access to any random services that you've tried out and forgot about. Hope that helps. -Andrew

zx2c4 14y ago
Sorry, but this isn't the case for me. IssuedAuthSubTokens shows a google talk authorization (bitlbee...), google calendar, and chrome. But if I try subscribing to LKML for a few weeks, gmail becomes completely unusable.
- hurstdog 14y ago
  I'm sorry that trick isn't working for you. As you mention LKML causes slowdown, it's possible that you're getting an inordinate amount of mail. It's also possible you've got an agressive IMAP client that isn't using one of those auth tokens (another common slowdown cause). As I mentioned in a comment below* if this persists please to post on the help forums. There are people dedicated to helping there, and if it's a legitimate bug the backend team investigates and we fix the issues. Hope that helps, -Andrew * http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4478100
zaptheimpaler 14y ago
The response is much appreciated! Suggestion: Why not give the UI interface priority over other polls (allocate more bandwidth to it) for 5-10 minute chunks when its active?
- hurstdog 14y ago
  There are people working on those sorts of improvements, but it's not that straightforward so it takes time to get it right. The reason that it's not that straightforward is that lots of operations change state in your account, so you need proper ordering of requests for everything that comes in if you want to ensure consistency. Furthermore when you do a UI operation you want it to happen now, and anything longer than that is frustrating. But if there is a large IMAP operation in the background, we can't just pre-empt that and re-start it because it might have already modified some state, not all changes are idempotent. So you have to wait, and you experience slowness. Add in message delivery, various background operations for different features, android sync, different third-party add-ons that hit via IMAP or other sync protocols, and a stack that is more than a few layers deep and it gets very complex, very fast. Hope that helps, -Andrew

bobbles 14y ago

Wow, thanks for that tip. I don't even use my gmail THAT often, but removing the connected apps I don't use has basically made opening my GMail instant (it would take a few seconds on the 'loading' bar previously)

Hurdy 14y ago
That's probably just because everything is cached now. Connected apps can't make loading slower.