Sunday, April 10, 2005

Gmail Doesn’t Scale?

Robert Scoble of Microsoft says:

“[We] already know that Gmail isn’t scalable. Ask Chris Uhlik. He runs the Gmail team. I did at O’Reilly’s Foocamp last year. Ask him why they limit the number of invites you can send out. Chris told me it wasn’t done for marketing reasons, but because they couldn’t keep the quality of service up without limiting the number of users on the system.”

Sure, Gmail sometimes is down, but mostly it’s up and running fast – and Google sends out a lot of invites while increasing storage at the same time. It doesn’t feel like they’re still having any problems scaling up.

But if you look at Orkut and Blogger, you’ll see two Google sites which are stressfully slow and often down, and this gives some reason to be suspicious. I recently tried to log-in to Orkut, just to see if it’s still as slow, and I was surprised to find it had become even slower – most images were not loading at all, and navigating the site was completely impossible.

Of course, Gmail isn’t Blogger or Orkut; Orkut is only “in affiliation” with Google, and Blogger was aquired by Google not too long ago. But if this ever happened to Gmail, I’m sure a lot of people will be very angry and take it personal... because email happens to be very personal.

[Via Inside Google.]

Gmail Doesn’t Scale? by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

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