Kevin Rose Load Tests Gmail

Slashdot Load Tests Kevin Rose's Web Server by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-26 13:36 · Score: 5, Funny

Bet he wasn't expecting that!

Fill your box with what? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-26 13:38 · Score: 5, Funny

With a gmail address of "fillmybox", I wonder what kind of file attachments he received!

That's nothing. by ktakki · 2004-07-26 13:40 · Score: 4, Funny

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

1GB = 1024MB so... by Compholio · 2004-07-26 13:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

... since Google advertises the service as 1GB of email storage 1023MB is technically under the limit and not 102% of the limit.

Re:1GB = 1024MB so... by Cody+Hatch · 2004-07-26 16:39 · Score: 4, Insightful

Um, no.

The standard prefixes kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc. mean the exact same thing when applied to ANY measure. That's the entire point of a standard, and the standard says 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, and 10^12, respectively.

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.

To be clear - the value of the SI prefixes do NOT change, no matter what you happen to be measuring. Thats the entire point of the SI system, for crying out loud! People may misuse the units (for example, I've heard people expressing their weight in kilograms, which is obviously absurd), and if you want to communicate with them, you may want to misuse the units in the same fashion, but it doesn't make them RIGHT.

<gratuitous flamage>
Let's see - you're arguing that a unit system which is bizarre, contradictory, outdated, and confusing even to its adherents is good, because it sort of mostly works, despite the fact that there is a better and clearer alternative.

Tell me, what's the weather like in your part of the US? Managed to blow up any launch vehicles recently? :-)
</gratuitous flamage>
Re:1GB = 1024MB so... by sik0fewl · 2004-07-26 17:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

The standard prefixes kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc. mean the exact same thing when applied to ANY measure. That's the entire point of a standard, and the standard says 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, and 10^12, respectively.

Well, they're actually SI prefixes and can't really be applied to any unit of measurement.

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.

It's a IEC standard, but not a universal standard. If you're an electrical engineer then you might have reason to use them, it's likely to confuse most other people (not that the situation isn't already confusing).

To be clear - the value of the SI prefixes do NOT change, no matter what you happen to be measuring. Thats the entire point of the SI system, for crying out loud!

That's right, whenever you apply them to *SI units*. Bytes are *NOT* SI units and kilo, mega, giga, etc are *NOT* SI prefixes when used to measure kilobytes, etc. Sure, they share the same names (the source of all the confusion), but they are not SI units and do not follow SI prefix rules.

By the way, I actually wouldn't mind kibi/mibi/etc prefixes myself but it would've been a lot nicer if they thought of that *before* using the same prefixes as SI. I think eventually the new naming will takeover, but saying that the current system is bizarre, contradictory and outdated is simply incorrect. However, to say it is confusing hits the nail on the head.

--
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Re:1GB = 1024MB so... by maxwell+demon · 2004-07-26 21:24 · Score: 4, Funny

Well, the most interesting data point still is the "1.44 MB" floppy disk: It has 1.44*1000 "KB", that is, 1.44*1000*1024 Bytes (2 sides * 80 tracks/side * 18 sectors/track * 512 Bytes/sector; the usable space is of course slightly less due to file system overhead). Therefore even with the new binary prefixes (KiB = Kibibytes = 2^10 Bytes, etc.) you have problems: It's neither true 1.44 MB (meaning 1.44*10^6 Bytes), nor 1.44 MiB (meaning 1.44*2^20 Bytes). Maybe the right term would be "1.44 KKiB" (1.44 Kilokibibytes).

--
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Re:1GB = 1024MB so... by TDRighteo · 2004-07-26 22:46 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

And your point is ? by IanBevan · 2004-07-26 13:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Re:And your point is ? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-26 13:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

Kevin Rose is a wannabe hacker (or cracker, whatever term you want to use) who tries to portray himself as a technology guru. This is simply another stunt to make him look cool in the eyes of script kiddies. Sad really...

The best way to load test... by strredwolf · 2004-07-26 13:41 · Score: 4, Funny

is to let everyone on Slashdot have an account, at once.

--

--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";

greatest moment ever on TSS by aardwolf204 · 2004-07-26 13:44 · Score: 4, Funny

...Kevin and co-host of the day finish talking about fillmybox@gmail.com and switch back over to Sarah for the news...

Sarah: "Fill my box"
Kevin: "I will later"

/me ROFL

Co-host of the day turns red.

Any words Kevin?

--
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the /.crowd.May ur days b merry & bright & may al

Fill My Box? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-26 13:46 · Score: 5, Funny

Haven't heard that from the wife in ages!

Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week! Tip your waitresses!

Re:Fill My Box? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-26 14:14 · Score: 5, Funny

That's odd. I hear it from her almost every day.

Next step, try the spam filters by sssmashy · 2004-07-26 13:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

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 by Motherfucking+Shit · 2004-07-26 16:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.

huh huh uh huh huh by gwoodrow · 2004-07-26 13:57 · Score: 5, Funny

[beavisandbutthead]

uh huh huh
uh huh huh
"fill my box"
uh huh huh

[/beavisandbutthead]

Re:false advertising, and email wars by Quill_28 · 2004-07-26 13:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

>24 megabytes is a substantial difference for most email users.

It is if you have 10MB or 100MB,
but not when you have 1000 megabytes.

100K of memory was alot when all you had was 640K, but 100k is nothing to most users nowadays.

Re:Whoah by Kris_J · 2004-07-26 14:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Goes to 102%.... by vwjeff · 2004-07-26 14:06 · Score: 5, Funny

The question has finally been answered.

Why is Gmail the best free webmail?

ANSWER: Your inbox goes to 102%!!!

Re:Goes to 102%.... by nfg05 · 2004-07-26 15:02 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Goes to 102%.... by MikeXpop · 2004-07-26 15:08 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Goes to 102%.... by secolactico · 2004-07-26 15:18 · Score: 4, Funny

No idea what happens now that it's 100 megs

One way to find out... post your address and we'll send you our favorite attachements. I have a video of Osama committing suicide that you might find interesting... ;-)

--
No sig

If you have kids... by Ieshan · 2004-07-26 14:10 · Score: 4, Funny

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...?

Re:false advertising, and email wars by Yolegoman · 2004-07-26 14:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

I doubt that the space is all that the users care about. I was quite content with 5 megs of space until the spam-bots got a hold of my Yahoo account.

No, the real deal is archiving all of your old email and the ability to search through it all, as well as targeted advertising... I detest picture-advertising... most kinds, that is. pr0n's another story.

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.

- Yolegoman

What a pointless load of tosh! by MarkTina · 2004-07-26 14:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 .."

Re:false advertising, and email wars by lakeland · 2004-07-26 15:18 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Re:conspiracy theories by rnicey · 2004-07-26 15:32 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

The "fill my box" recording: Download by Fog+Dogg · 2004-07-26 15:35 · Score: 5, Informative

Here's the segment from g4techtv captured by me: http://www.members.shaw.ca/fog_dogg_69/fillmybox.w mv

stress testing conversations by adpowers · 2004-07-26 20:03 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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