Google: “Gmail Speed Issue Fixed…and 2 More Pixels Added to Inbox Height”

If you are one of tens of millions of gmail users, you may have noticed a bit of lag and latency issues plaguing your daily Gmail adventures. I can attest that it’s been awful — Im talking wait times of anywhere from 5 seconds up to 30 seconds. When contacted by TechCrunch, Google responded saying that they weren’t aware of any issues, though they would investigate the matter further.

Google did in fact turn up something in their search. In response to TechCrunch’s original email, Google had the following to say:

We recently experienced an issue in one of our datacenters which increased latency for a small percentage of Gmail users (approximately 2%). Issues like this can cause temporary slowness for small fractions of users from time to time. Speed is of utmost importance to us, and we are always working both to prevent these kinds of issues and resolve them as soon as possible.

So it wasn’t the crazies just rambling. There was a legitimate issue. Of course, how big it actually was is unknown. Google claimed in their official statement that it was less than 2%. But even then, 2% of roughly the hundreds of millions of adds up to quite a bit.

We’re interested to hear just how widespread it was. Were you affected by Gmail’s recent rash of slow down over the last few weeks?

In other news: Google added an extra two pixels-worth of vertical space to all our inboxes. Yay.

iPhone problems? Could it be because AT&T doesn’t know how to configure their own network?

Many iPhone users on AT&T in the U.S. usually spend at least a small part of each day rationalizing why their coverage or network performance sucks so bad. Everything from hardware to network problems cross their minds as they desperately seek an answer. Many will claim that AT&T simply needs to add more towers as increased network load from increasingly dense cities puts an ever increasing load on each tower. But is that really the answer? Could be something as simple as an improperly configured network? Surely they must have that part down…right? Maybe not.

According to Brough Turner, a telecommunications employee since 1983, AT&T does in fact have an improperly configured network sighting examples of how ping times on AT&T are most often either really good or really bad with no real middle ground/grey area. More specifically, Brough Tuner states that “misconfigured buffers in their mobile core network” are the sole reason AT&T’s network sucks. Further supporting his hypothesis, IntoMobile states simple facts regarding population density in Shanghai whom back in 2007, had a staggering average of 13,400 people per square kilometer. That’s insane! Even still, Shanghai was only ranked as the 10th most densely populated city. Now take into account that a bulk of AT&T’s problems in the US occur in large cities where densities are sky high. Sky high on a national scale however, as globally speaking, the most densely populated U.S. city is that of Los Angeles with a paltry 2,700 people per square kilometer and a ranking of 90th place when population densities are concerned. As you can see, the problems here in the U.S. are a fraction of what China goes through, yet they somehow manage to keep their networks up and running without the ridiculous problems that plague us stateside.

So what is AT&T’s problem? It’s anybody’s guess. Does Turner’s hypothesis have any weight? Sure it does. But AT&T will deny any such issue and repeat the same “huge increase in demand line”. While true, you can only blame demand for so long before people begin questioning you as to why it’s taking so long to fix the issue at hand.

IntoMobile > Slashdot > Brough Turner

Image Source