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Kevin Rose Load Tests Gmail
SishGupta writes "Load Testing Gmail - fillmybox@gmail.com
A few weeks ago, Kevin Rose of the The Screen Savers decided to load test Google's new email service, Gmail. He asked everyone to email him their favourite 5MB attachments to 'fillmybox@gmail.com.'
The test Gmail account is now 102% maxed out.
You can read about the test and the results at Kevin Rose.com (his weblog)."
Bet he wasn't expecting that!
And I was thinking the fact I was at 13% was quite impressive.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I've had little success with GMail's "auto ignore" option. Check this mozilla screengrab out:
http://etrade.malformed.org/Screenshot.png
With a gmail address of "fillmybox", I wonder what kind of file attachments he received!
I'm thinking we hit Gmail with around 50-75,000+, 5MB+ emails in a 10-15min window.
Why does anyone listen to him...he's half security, half pirate, half hacker.
That's more then 100%!!!
~Eric
...may the Gmail privacy flaming begin!
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Posting anonymously to avoid karma whoring...
A few weeks ago, you may remember that we decided to load test Google's new email service, Gmail. I called on all of you to email me your favorite 5MB attachments to "fillmybox@gmail.com". Well, we did it! My Gmail account is now 102% maxed out.
Here are the results of the test:
July 12th: Created account and promoted it on The Screen Savers. Within 5 minutes, Gmail processed over 300 mail messages (most with 5+ MB attachments). 10 minutes into the test, I started receiving various internal server error messages and was no longer able to login. Proceeded to login with other Gmail accounts to ensure this was not a site wide problem. All other accounts worked fine.
July 13-17th: Still unable to login. At this point, I'm feeling I must have triggered some type of internal fraud flag that suspended my account. I have received 2,000+ emails (to my personal non-Gmail address) from viewers who have received bounced mail when attempting to message the Gmail account. So how many emails where sent? No way to tell for sure, but considering that our network is in 50+ million homes, that I plugged it twice, and I received over 2,000 complaints from people who actually took the time to dig around and find my personal email address, I'm thinking we hit Gmail with around 50-75,000+, 5MB+ emails in a 10-15min window.
July 26th: Finally able to log back in, and the account is full! It took 686 email messages that were received on July 12th-15th. For some reason Gmail allowed me to go past my 1000MB limit to 1023MB (1GB=1024MB). The account can no longer receive mail messages (they are bounced) or send outgoing mail. The strange thing is that Google doesn't send any type of warning emails once you are nearing or reach your limit - but I'm sure this will be added in the final release.
The only odd thing about the entire test is the login issue. It's strange to me that all of my other accounts worked fine, but for some reason the test account was frozen. [THEORY] I have a feeling this had to do with mail message processing. Google knows that 80% of mail messages are text, and we all know that text is highly compressible. That said, they probably only have around 2-300MB of storage allocated for each 1GB account (obviously this will fluctuate up to 1GB depending on the user's mail content). My take on this, is that they have a huge series of RAID arrays at their server farm. Every time an email comes in, it is compressed and stored in that users account on the RAID. Upon account login the user's data is decompressed, indexed, and moved to some type of RAM/solid state drive for quick access. Once this is complete, it is then displayed to the end user (a 1-2 second process). I have a feeling that due to the huge number of incoming emails, I had some type of processing time out occur. The server was trying to write data to my library (thousands of new msgs), while retrieve and displaying data - resulting in errors. A few days after things settled down (and a few cron jobs later), Gmail was able to sort things out [END THEORY]. At some point I will talk to my buddy over at Google and have him find out how they really do it.
Anyhow.. Here are a few pics of the maxed out account:
- 1023MB
- Outgoing Error Message
Sorry for the rambling and poor post structure, it's 2:35am and I can hardly keep my eyes open, I'm off to bed. night.
+krose
-- sign up for my newsletter to find out what I'm up to --
certainly an inventive way to get a response.
Why, just last night I wrote a little program that load tests Google.
Regards,
Arthur MyDoom, Jr.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
... since Google advertises the service as 1GB of email storage 1023MB is technically under the limit and not 102% of the limit.
Great way to improve your site's traffic.
His account maxed out at just under 1024 MB.
"Dave, I stand still--the conclusions jump to me!" - Bill McNeal, NewsRadio
Mod me down as flamebait if you really must, but what really was the point of this exercise ? I'm sure Google would find it an interesting test -assuming they've not already tried it themselves - but as the author says, he's never actually told anybody at google about it. It just doesn't strike me as particularly constructive...
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
is to let everyone on Slashdot have an account, at once.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
...Kevin and co-host of the day finish talking about fillmybox@gmail.com and switch back over to Sarah for the news...
/me ROFL
Sarah: "Fill my box"
Kevin: "I will later"
Co-host of the day turns red.
Any words Kevin?
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
porn2.mog
porn3.mpg
Ahh.. gotta love when they put the offer out there for you.
Hmmm.
what is this "fill my box" segment that the comments below keep refering to?
Come on, lets here the good stuff.
Lets here the statistics on how much porn and what types of porn you got.
On a serious note, a lot of people would say that "nobody uses email like that". But what they don't realize is that, we will if we could. Wouldn't it be nice to advertise like that on tv and not worry about how much people mail you. Like "America's funnies home videos" or something similar, send in your video at blah@somewhere.com. It would be nice to get mass amounts of video in emails like that.
Mark
Haven't heard that from the wife in ages!
Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week! Tip your waitresses!
I received over 2,000 complaints from people who actually took the time to dig around and find my personal email address, I'm thinking we hit Gmail with around 50-75,000+, 5MB+ emails in a 10-15min window.
Think of all the spam that one of these accounts could hold. I propose testing Gmail's spam filters next: disseminate your Gmail addy to porn sites, and everywhere else it will likely be harvested by a spam bot. Sit back, and let the spam roll in. It should be interesting to see just how fast this sucker fills up with ads for penis enlargers.
and what exactly is a joke?
I'm thinking we hit Gmail with around 50-75,000+, 5MB+ emails in a 10-15min window.
Hopefully google didn't take that personally.
I'd like to know if his theory about the compressed storage leading to a timeout condition is realistic.
That Gmail let him go over his 1000 MB limit is interesting, or rather, that the limit is exactly 1000 MBs is interesting, as Gmail has been toting its accounts as 1 GB accounts (1 gig = 1024 MBs ).
24 megabytes is a substantial difference for most email users.
Would advertising it as 1 GB be then considered false? Or would it not matter, because they let you fill up your account to near 1024 GBs, anyway? (1023 was what Kevin Rose reached before it said he reached his quota).
On another note, I did get an email from MSN about how it will begin to offer 2 GBs of space...
Is this the beginning of email wars? (a-la browser wars, "back in the day")
That post would have sucked a whole lot less ass if I had entered my numbers right. 1 GiB is not 10^30 bytes, it's 2^30 bytes. My sincerest apologies for correcting you in a way that requires correction itself.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
we all want to know how google does it, don't we?
here's what he thinks:
Google knows that 80% of mail messages are text, and we all know that text is highly compressible. That said, they probably only have around 2-300MB of storage allocated for each 1GB account (obviously this will fluctuate up to 1GB depending on the user's mail content). My take on this, is that they have a huge series of RAID arrays at their server farm. Every time an email comes in, it is compressed and stored in that users account on the RAID.
this should be closer to the truth: Venti: a new approach to archival storage
awesome
[beavisandbutthead]
uh huh huh
uh huh huh
"fill my box"
uh huh huh
[/beavisandbutthead]
It would be nice if Gmail would have an option to not quote everything. Conversations become really huge after a certain point and then you're stuck seeing single e-mails becoming a meg in size without any attachments. Then the replies just build in size. I'm not really sure why they get to be so big when it should just be plain text.
I surely hope not, isn't this false advertising? What about opening another box so we can fill it up with highly compressed data.
Verily.
Kind of poetic to see the complete definition of dookie on slashdot.
The question has finally been answered.
Why is Gmail the best free webmail?
ANSWER: Your inbox goes to 102%!!!
Can't we just flame about Kevin Rose? I can't stand him! He's such an annoying know-it-all jerk!
If you have kids named Arthur MyDoom, are you going to stick to the old standard (Arthur MyDoom the 3rd, the 4th, etc), or the new approach - Arthur MyDoom.B, Arthur MyDoom.C, Arthur MyDoom.D...?
..something that belongs on a porno.
Why do they even let him talk? He's a script kiddie with a show. Real security experts write code and understand protocols, rfcs, reverse engineer, etc. I know I can't be the only one who thinks this.
I'm surprised he hasn't had anything compromised yet. Perhaps he has been and I don't know it.
On his site: "Kevin is currently writing a book on computer security." This should be interesting. I will definitly buy it (probably in the Fiction section at Amazon). Perhaps the book will come out right after DNF.
What is the point in his test ? Did he think that Google hadn't done any testing at all ? Did he think that if a mailbox hit 100% something dreadful would happen ? Of course it's going to work just fine, 1Mb, 10Mb, 100Mb, 1000Mb or even 10,000Mb is just a tiny dribble in the ocean that is Googles' infrastructure. He's just looking for some kind of kudos ... "Hey dude I filled up my Gmail account!" "Wow! That's so ... so ... actually that's pretty lame .."
I signed up my GMail account to every Apple mailing list, mainly because I am a developer and want a searchable archive of exactly the mailing lists i want.
Slashdot's formatting is currently seriosuly screwed up in Mozilla, except here on the post comment page. The comments and the front page all have the menu all the way at the bottom with the stories being full page width.
At 10:15pm Monday night, the Slashdot main page looks weird. Anyone?
Seemed to be around about that time too. Maybe it was related. Some of the guys here at work were fine though. Maybe logins are always directed to a single server (not just the storage of the emails).
Anyone have a video clip of the segment I can host? _dan http://www.uneasysilence.com
Google stored email in a RAID and then moves it to RAM when you want it? That's his theory?
Whatta idiot. Clue to "The Dark Tipper": EVERY application moves data from disk to RAM so it can be worked on.
To think the geniuses at G4 decided they build The Screen Savers show around him because he was under 30. G4TECHTV is more doomed than ever.
If you have the clip e-mail me at admin (at) uneasysilence.com I would love to host it
_dan
http://www.uneasysilence.com
That great sigh of disappointment you hear is the sound of thousands of porn site administrators realizing that one of the gmail account names they really wanted has been taken...
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
G4TechTV sux0rz. Curse you, Comcast! Curse you!
(Yeah, I know he's on KFI Radio here in LA. Whatever, I miss him on TSS.)
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
gspot@fillmybox.com sounds like a porn webmaster email. No wonder he wants all these attachments.
Why do you want one?
Seriously.
It's just fucking webmail.
fuck you liar, i went through the trouble of opening the link because of you, then never got to see dead bodies, dipshit
Who needs colocation or a business line? Just get a cheap virtual server. Plenty of power to host you and your family/friends' email.
done.
enjoy.
rob.
well, now we know that when you max out your gmail mailbox, you will no longer be able to send it mail.
/much/ more constructive use.
That's fantastic.
i would have put that account to
how much does this guy get paid?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
send me your email addy to hollman2@gmail.com and I'll give you one.
The video is hosted at http://www.uneasysilence.com. I love the line right before the caller. Check it out!
http://yulian.firdaus.or.id/komentar.php?id=176_0_ 1_5_C
1GB=1024MB
why google calculate 1GB=1000MB?
-- There is four mistake in this sentences.
Now Kevin will have load tests for his web server too!
SIGFAULT
Oh, I must be the only nerd on slashdot that doesn't have a gmail account yet. Since everybody's asking, would anybody mind sending a spare gmail invite to me?
My (hopefully, soon to be obsolete) email addy is rohan_leader@hotmail.com
Thanks so much :)
Thanks buddy.
Ryan
"One of the other factors that makes the service so appealing to me is I trust Google, unlike Microsoft or Yahoo, to not sell my email address. When the company who gave you the email address is handing it out to the spammers (or spamming the box themselves), something is wrong." What purpose would Yahoo have for selling e-mail addresses? They just route it into their bulk mail folder to be easily deleted anyway. Surely this isn't a long term advertising option. That's like paying for direct mailings, only to have the distributing company put them directly into the customers' trash cans on trash day.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
All good bugs need to be verified to make sure they realy exist. SO anyone want to give me a gmail invite so I can verify the login bug for the good of mankind?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
i too would like to load test my gmail account.
please mail me your fav porn movies.
thanks
[Peter Griffin]
eh heh heh
eh heh heh
"fill my box"
eh heh heh
eh heh heh
"diarrhea"
eh heh heh
[/Peter Griffin]
Montreal - Best city to live in!
ok.. I'll whore for one too :-)
planetmonkey (at) hotmail.com , anyone, please?
ty!
How many thousands of people had already done that?
Game... blouses.
err.. anyone has some spare gmail invitation.. please help me out..
I dont want the last person on earth to get an gmail account
Please donate..you will be rewarded in heaven..
Here's the segment from g4techtv captured by me: http://www.members.shaw.ca/fog_dogg_69/fillmybox.w mv
SI rules. Of course it makes sense to have water freeze at 32 degrees instead of 0, and boil at 212 instead of 100... And why the hell would you want to mess with turning 1 kilometer into 1,000 meters, when you can turn 1 mile into 5,280 feet! And to realize that 1 liter is 1,000 milliliters is stupid, since we can instead make 1 gallon (US, liquid - or 0.86 gallon US dry - or 0.83 gallon UK) into 128 fl.oz. I rest my case.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Kevin posts pictures of the new TSS set @ G4 in LA
I'm not a hater but Kevin Rose seems to take every opportunity he can to get onto Slashdot for something not-so-big.
I know plenty of his friends and followers submit his stories in the past (hell he has been linked on the front of slashdot at least 4 or 5 times) for every little thing he does.
Makes you wonder if he asks them to help him do it or what.
Again, I'm not trying to sound like a hater but I just notice this pattern happening.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Could any kind and generous slashdotter save me from yahoo mail with a gmail invite?
Yes, I know, -1 Offtopic, but I'd appreciate a hookup! ninenine_99@yahoo.com
Thanks!
SEE HIS HISTORY
Why should people pay for either colocation or a business grade line to their homes when GAYmail does a good enough job for free?
Because it is idiotic to rely on an email service you don't have ANY control over. And storing all your stuff there (which may be gone any second if Google decides so) is even dumber.
When will people learn that THERE AIN'T NO SUCH THING AS FREE LUNCH?
Yeah...let me further your line of reasoning and say that there is no reason that we should have switched away from using base 1 for everything, since it's the first way, and every other approach is merely a redundant way to write it, and therefore part of the plot to lead to the eventual heat-death of the universe.
Computers use powers of two for every kind of calculation. The most important reason of all to do the measurements this way is because it's easier. It wasn't random, wasn't folly, wasn't totally rediculous.
The redefinition allows us to use the units in a calculable way. It also makes a kind of sense to redefine mega, giga, and tera in terms of base 2 because a byte is a base 2 unit. Why not just go all out when you're using them and make everything else base 2 as well? You may not that bits, which come out to a nice, round number in every number base, are measured in base 10. A terabit is 10^12 bits.
It's too much to ask that a microcontroller that reports usage have half of it's hardware devoted to base conversion, especially when the result may come out to some terrible fraction. To use your statement, I find that just because people are using mega, giga, and tera with the original meanings just because they're entrenched is folly at best and is better regarded as arrogant.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
What would be really interesting now would be to know what exactly people sent him in those 5meg attachments.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Good test? Old news. A friend of mine, Milo, did this two weeks ago. I even submitted a Slashdot article. But it got rejected. Why? Some guy in the Netherlands isn't as important as the all mighty Kevin Rose of the Screen Savers I guess. :-\
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
seeing as people are giving away gmail accounts, I could really use one.. please send invites to wouldratherhavegmail@hotmail.com
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
If you haven't already fulfilled this promise, I'd appreciate a Gmail account as well. AJYeary@yahoo.com. And yes, I know Yahoo filters Gmail invites as spam... Which means I'll be digging through my Bulk Mail folder for the next couple days!
~aj~
I need a gmail acount, my addy is frostbite204@gmail.com
If I ever met someone who said or wrote "gibibyte" and "mibibyte" I would surely be inclined towards kicking them in the face and crotch.
That is some wholly ludicrous shit. Everyone knows it is thoroughly ridiculous. They sound like the squeaks of a retarded baby. ME BI BYTE! KI BI! GI BI!
To know the heinous nature of these words you must look at who benefits from them. It is clear that by redefining "gigabyte" the only people who benefit are hard drive manufacturers. In the ensuing confusion they can stop delivering anything like what they advertise and just make up the capacities of their drives. Recently I purchased two "160 gigabyte" hard drives. One of them was about 156 gigabytes while the other turned out to be about 149 gigabytes. I trust both my BIOS and my OS before I trust hard drive marketing and they say I'm getting a bit of the shaft. This is called deception. Lies. Widely agreed upon as immoral and harmful behavior. That is what "kibibyte" is all about.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The standard prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, etc. mean the exact same thing when applied to ANY measure. That's the entire point of a standard, and the standard says 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, and 2^40, respectively.
So exactly what measures, other than units of computer storage, are you intending to apply these prefixes to?
If the answer is "none", then it's not a standard, it's a kludge.
...laporte junior? kevin rose needs to be stopped, he's following in the misinfo footsteps of his mentor mr Leo Laporte. I was so happy when when leo was canned but was sad to see they pulled a cheaper replacement (clone). G4-TECH TV needs to be turned back into a shop at home clone... it's dead to me now...
Please pay up for your copy of Linux, thank you, that will be all. And if I catch you near those Free As In Beer OSS websites, you'll be in big big trouble, comprendo?
*sniff* Smells like a spammer harvesting emails to me...
While you certainly pay a price for OSS (not having the same kind of support as with proprietary software etc.) that is something different.
You certainly don't expect a company like Google to give stuff away for free just for the fun of it?
would be mighty fresh, wouldn't it. :D
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
"Excuse me, and you are.."
"It's me! Dr. Rosenrose."
"Who?"
"Dr. Rosenpenis."
"I'm sorry, who did you say?"
"It's me, Kevin Rose Load."
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
I've done a little bit of my own stress testing. However, I've done it a little bit different. I wanted to see how Gmail handled huge conversations. I e-mailed my brother and we spammed each other back and forth in the same thread, seeing if we could influence the Ads. After a while we started adding more people to the conversation (our current test thread has nine people). We started out by hitting Reply All and saving the quotes from the previous e-mail. It became a huge list of >>> near the bottom and eventually Gmail clipped the messages. After a few hundred replies, opening the thread became slower and slower. When it reached 426 replies, it took me a week to finally get into it. With that I made one last reply and closed the thread. Hey, just out of curiosity, I opened the thread now and it loaded pretty easily. I wonder if they have optimized their behind the scenes engine to make it faster for large conversations. Maybe I'll continue the thread. Also, if you want to be part of the new test thread, just send an e-mail to adpowers@gmail.com.
Anyway, here is my Gmail stress test.
Also, you'll notice I have a few mailing lists on the side. I only read the Freenet one, but I subscribed to the Linux Kernel list and some others because I know them to be high traffic. Gmail is pretty impressive and they seem to be optimizing it even more.
actualy... they aren't giving away stuff for free...
see those adds on the right of your gmail?
they create money for google, making a profit for google.
and unless you find that your paying yust by looking at those adds, gmail is still free for you, even tho google is earning a profit from it.
All indicators show that the human race is selectively breeding itself for stupidity.
I guess "kev" is my hero now
The guy ran the *test* without informing Gmail people and his *promotion* resulted in Gmail receiving 70-80K 5MB mails in 10-15 minutes. Isn't that tantamount to a DDoS? Shouldn't the guy be booked for something?
PS - I RTFA
I load tested cgp with 100Mb files. it worked great man...i'm just a dumb AC. I'm not related to them. i did this for a small company 100 peps
dullest experiment EVER.
The Google Filesystem has a Blocksize of 64MB (see http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-g hemawat.pdf for more information), so most likely the reason for the 1024MB of total size is, that the granularity of the quota system is 64MB too.
Damn, and here I thought the speed limit on my commute was 61440 meters per hour. Drat! I guess I'll have to slow down to a paltry 60000.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I appreciate that gmail is in a test phase, but it sucks that this hack is wasting his account on a publicity stunt (don't for a second think it's more than that) when there are thousands of people begging for invites all over the world.
like me: matthyw at canoemail dot ca
Sorry. Lame begging aside, what does he think he's going to accomplish by this? It's basically an excuse to say something dirty over a public media stream.
If enough people send each other copies of the "fill my gmail" video clip, will they fill gmail?
That selfish bastard:
"Proceeded to login with other Gmail accounts to ensure this was not a site wide problem. All other accounts worked fine."
He has multiple Gmail accounts, and I don't have a single one. Even more of a kick in the pants: The 3 variations of my e-mail name have already been taken on gmail.Please send me an invitation as well. Thanks!
fillmybox@gmail.com
That sounds like a bad porn site.
I dunno... Kevin Rose's rambling explanation of GMail using a huge RAID array, and that business about copying your mail into "some type of RAM/solid state drive", and something about cron jobs sorting things out after a few days... I mean, does he actually know what he's talking about? (Being in the UK, I have never heard of him.)
Surely, for starters, they're using their Google File System to do the storage?
What kind of a person designs a website to show gray text on a black background? Is it his intent to make it as difficult as possible to read what he has to write?
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Because Kevin Rose reminds me of those tech guys who solve stuff by rebooting first and then reloading the OS if that fails. I liked the show when it was Leo and Patrick. Mainly because these guys have been around and remember the old days. These new guys suck.
'Same speed C but faster'
Firkins, Furlongs, and Fortnights rule! And we thus eliminate the arbitrary seconds and use the more interesting microfortnights.
Now that the whoring has started, I'll join the party and ask for a gmail invite. Anyone got one? If so you can send it to bill99947 NOSPAM AT hotmail dot com remove spaces and nospam Thx
" (for example, I've heard people expressing their weight in kilograms, which is obviously absurd)"
Please explain to me since I'm not very good at recognizing obvious absurdities. And neither are many other people I guess, since it is usual to express one's weight in kilograms in many countries (Japan, for example). How are these people "misusing the unit"?
...that he gets to bang Sarah Lane.
(That said, you're right about him not really being a guru.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
thanks to a very kind soul, I have a gmail account now, so no need to send me any more :)
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I am one of the developers for a SMTP server for a free mail provider so I have a bit of experience with this. In our case you can exceed your quota slightly in a couple of ways:
1) Sometimes a message comes in and the sending SMTP server didn't advertise the size of the message ahead of time, so it goes through the RCPT stage of sending a list of recipients for that message and you need to decide whether to accept or decline the message for each receiving user. In this case, because the length of the message is unknown until after the list is sent you don't know if it will cause the new message to exceed a particular users quota and therefore it is best to only reject delivery to people that have *already exceeded* their quota. This prevents you from having to accept the message and then queue up a bounce to send back to the sender. So for example someone with a 10MB quota and 8MB in their mailbox already, if they receive a 3MB attachment, could have 11MB of mail before the next message is rejected -- rather than accepting the message, seeing that it would exceed and having to ship it back to the sender.
2) In a distributed environment it is more efficient to update the mailbox size in batches rather than real-time, so there may be a few seconds or minutes lag between the time a message is received and the time it is incremented in their profile. Therefore someone with 8MB of mail might receive five 1MB attachments within a few seconds and have them all accepted before their totals are updated to show them as exceeding their quota.