Our older friendly GMail gave us a new user mail experience compared to the other services that were available. Firstly, it concentrated on one important point and that was- Mail. Inbox is all about how simple and fast we can load the inbox and get to our mails. Not some fancy graphic flashing on the top or some widget loading on and on and on. But with the new version of GMail, we have been encountering certain problems. For example, in sending attachments, or open large mails, or mails with image links etc. We have all seen the irritating message ” This is taking longer than usual”. I even faced other problems like my Chat becoming disabled all of a sudden, or the other error message ” System encountered an error”.

The New GMail Blog post assures GMail users to not face the above mentioned problems anymore and even feel an enhanced user experience. According to the post by Wiltse Carpenter, GMail’s load time has seen a 20% reduction compared to when they started the service. Hmm, hard to believe. But I would like to. Anyway, the technical details of how the reduction of performance time has been implemented is given on the blog. Although, I would like to include an excerpt of it.

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. 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. But when we examined our requests, we realized that we could do better. We decided to attack the problem from several directions at once: reduce the number of overall requests, make more of the requests cacheable by the browser, and reduce the overhead of each request.

So did they finally achieve it? Find out on the blog.