To put these numbers in perspective, a popular network news site's home page required about a 180 requests to fully load when I checked it yesterday. We spent hours poring over these traces to see exactly what was happening between the browser and Gmail during the sign-in sequence, and we found that there were between fourteen and twenty-four HTTP requests required to load an inbox and display it. It really helps that we can capture and save browser traces with it too. The Httpwatch plug-in for Internet Explorer was one that proved easy to use and provided us with most of the information we needed. These tools all have useful features, although some are limited to working only with certain browsers. To do this, we used a lot of different web development tools, like Httpwatch, WireShark, and Fiddler, plus our own performance measuring systems. While the improvements we made won't resolve every 'This is taking longer than usual.' message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we've seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.įirst, we listed every transaction between the web browser and Google's servers, starting with the moment the 'Sign in' button is pressed. One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the 'Sign in' button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. 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.

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

Gmail takes a long time to load