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)."

Comments

And your point is ?

[IanBevan]

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...

Next step, try the spam filters

[sssmashy]

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.

Re:Next step, try the spam filters

[Motherfucking Shit]

Think of all the spam that one of these accounts could hold.

I set up a Gmail account just over a month ago (on June 23rd). After I used it for a couple of test messages with friends, I set up a few of my most spammed email accounts to forward to Gmail. As of now, I have 67497 spam messages, using 360 MB (36%) of my 1000 MB.

Gmail has gotten better at catching spam on its own, but it's not great yet. I use SpamAssassin and score anything over 6.1 as spam. Gmail sends stuff with scores as high as 8 straight to my inbox. Granted, it's easy to set up a system that works for me; it's hard to set up a system that works for everyone.

One thing I've found really interesting is the ability to instantly search through 67,000+ spams! It's amazing how prolific the "random words to defeat Bayesian filters" spam tactic has gone. Just about every word I've tried appears somewhere within the contents of 67,000 spams...

Search results for: in:anywhere anthropomorphic 1 - 20 of about 80

Search results for: in:anywhere antagonistic 1 - 20 of about 150

Search results for: in:anywhere necromancy 1 - 20 of 61

Search results for: in:anywhere juxtaposition 1 - 20 of 58

Search results for: in:anywhere loquacious 1 - 20 of 51

It's crazy. I wasted a few minutes last week searching through my Gmail spam archive trying to find a word that didn't appear anywhere, and came up with very few successes. If nothing else, Gmail is probably the world's biggest and most accurate archive of spam.

Re:Whoah

[Kris_J]

I can tell you that the theory is realistic, having run several compressed filesystems and generally having an interest in (transparent) compression, but I can't say if it's correct. It sounds a little wrong as it's fairly easy to say "no, don't try to compress files with extension X because it won't work". More likely Gmail choked on the decoding of attachments -- as you wouldn't store them in a wasteful 7-bit format.

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.

Re:false advertising, and email wars

[lakeland]

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.

stress testing conversations

[adpowers]

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.