Yesterday, we posted about horrible latency issues many Gmail users have been experiencing over the past couple of weeks. When I reached out to Google about the issue a few days ago, they told me that they weren’t aware of anything wrong, but would look into it. Well, those of us who noticed it aren’t crazy. Sure enough, there was an issue, and Google says they have now fixed it.
Google reached out to us today with the following statement:
We recently experienced an issue in one of our datacenters which increased latency for a small percentage of Gmail users (approximately 2%). Issues like this can cause temporary slowness for small fractions of users from time to time. Speed is of utmost importance to us, and we are always working both to prevent these kinds of issues and resolve them as soon as possible.
That sounds about right since, as we said, everyone wasn’t noticing the issue but plenty of users were, and it was only happening some of the time. 2 percent of Gmail’s user base still is about 4 million people.
And before I even got this message from Google, I did notice Gmail running significantly more smoothly this morning. I asked some others on Twitter if they noticed an improvement as well, and it was more of a mixed bag — but plenty who were having problems said they’re now resolved.
As a somewhat humorous sidenote, Google also confirmed that they recently added 2 pixels to the line height of the inbox view of Gmail. This was something I had asked them last week and I think they thought I was crazy. Again, I wasn’t, a UX designer made the change.
http://twitter.com/#!/herzleid/status/29577583638