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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)."
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.
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.
I hammered my own gmail account by forwarding up all my old messages using an Eudora filter. I was sending as many as 2,000 messages in a 15 minute period at one stage. While Gmail didn't lock me out, some messages took a particularly long time to appear. These messages were typically old automated receipts, such as eBay messages, that all look very similar but are in fact separate conversations. I'm guessing that there's a lot of overhead when a message arrives to determine if it's related to existing messages.
Nobody can read 1GB of text. Therefore the only way to use a gig of email is if either a) it isn't text, or b) you're not actually reading it.
For instance people getting MPEGs in the mail won't notice the difference between 1000MB and 1024MB. Similarly, people subscribed to a dozen mailinglists, hoping to use google to quickly find any message, won't notice the difference since a few days email will fill up the difference.
To make it really clear... say you can read 100 text emails a day. Now, if those emails are text they'll be about 5k, or around half a meg a day. So you're talking about six _years_ worth of email before you fill your box, with the extra 24MB getting you an extra month on your six years. For people getting ten text emails a day worth keeping, 1GB will probably hold enough email for life.
Why is it so hard for people to admit when they are doing something stupid and correct it? The idea that we should continue doing something simply because it is entrenched is folly at best and is better described as arrogant. I find the idea that we should do something simply because it is the way it has always been done to be absolutely horrific.
Apparently the moderatorship agrees with you that I am wrong, because they have moderated my comment as flamebait, in spite of an utter lack of intent to flame. I simply want words to have as few meanings as possible. The english language, made up as it is of smatterings of all different languages, is complicated enough without me having to now consider all different possible meanings for a technical lexicon as well, while at the same time trying to retain knowledge of assorted programming languages, operating system commands, and so on. Hence, I attempt to do my part against entropy - it can never be stamped out, but it can be minimized on a local scale.
Now you probably think (more than before) that I am a wanker. However, we are faced with incontrovertible proof that you are a coward, and as such I will not allow your opinion to bother me more than is required to write this comment.
I state my assertion once more: mega means one million, 10^6. To try to use the prefix to mean something else, besides the idea of something very large which makes sense given that it is from a greek word meaning "great", is a mistake. To make it try to mean 2^10 is sheer folly. Continuing in this vein, we see that giga means one billion (10^9) and is descended from greek gigas, or "giant", and that tera means 10^12 (one trillion) and is descended from the greek word for monster but none of these words (or parts of words) has a meaning that has anything to do with powers of two. To take a word with a specific meaning, and to assign it a similar but different meaning can not be anything but ridiculous. To attempt to correct such an error might be impossible, but it won't stop me from trying to do what I see as essentially the right and more importantly logical thing. Computers are tools of logic - why encumber the very language with which we describe them with illogic?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.