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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)."
Actually, Hotmail allows you to fill about 110% of your capacity before it actually starts to bounce messages. Right now it's a measly 2 MB, but it should be increased to 250 MB in the next few weeks.
While this is funny and all, I'll explain.
Google offers 1 GB, or 1000 MB, of space. They do this as to not confuse non-tech folk. When you reach 1000 megs, it's 100% full. When you reach the actual limit of 1024 megs, it's 102% full.
Oh, and back when yahoo had a 4 meg limit, my throway's account would gather up spam and it would stop me at 5 megs, or 125% of the limit. No idea what happens now that it's 100 megs.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
What he thinks is most likely a bunch of rot.
Decompress a gig on the fly when you login. Please... Do me a lemon.
The real trick is in the routing for this type of application. When mail is delivered it is switched to a bank of servers which deal with your account (and many others obviously). The messages are indexed and stored.
When you login there will be a range of load balanced servers routing your read requests back to that same bank of storage from the frontline web servers.
Limit management is either done in the application logic, or in the database engine. Under load, with simultaneous receipts it's easy to see why you could go over 100% of storage. It's either that or you have to serialize the delivery per user which would suck and be harder.
It's not a hard concept, but it is tricky to get right in implementation. This is what Google does best though.
Here's the segment from g4techtv captured by me: http://www.members.shaw.ca/fog_dogg_69/fillmybox.w mv
Already done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
Unfortunately, this means the standard prefix actually changes for the more "engineering" of the two sizes, and I don't think it has a lot of acceptance.
1 KiB = 2^10 B
1 MiB = 2^20 B
1 GiB = 2^30 B
etc.
They are rather fun to say though.