Why is GMail and Yahoo mail so sluggish, but everything else fast on my network?

October 21, 2007 12:12 PM

Why is GMail and Yahoo mail so sluggish, but everything else fast on my network? Just about every other site works fast and great - YouTube, even BitTorrent downloads - but GMail and Yahoo mail both hang like crazy. Sometimes reloading the page works for a few minutes, but not always.

This is happening on both a new Mac, as well as an older Mac - same model (PowerBook Pro) on the same network. A PC on the network DOESN'T have this problem. But if I access these laptops any other way - ie, at a coffee shop, GMail and Yahoo work fine. SBC Pacific Bell (AT&T) denies the problem could be on their end, but this has been issue for months. Sometimes both GMail and Yahoo work great for hours, and then will intermittently be sluggish non-stop for days at a time. And, yes, I've followed all the troubleshooting at the GMail site without any improvement. Help?

posted by Unsomnambulist to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Does using the HTML version of GMail speed things up? I highly doubt it's a network speed issue; GMail especially is a heavily AJAXified site, built entirely in JavaScript and some browsers do less brilliantly than others.

When I'm debugging, I run a Firefox extension called Firebug. It's an incredible tool that lets me analyze everything going on on a page, including AJAX and JSON calls and everything in between. But if I leave it running, certain JS-heavy pages will simply choke because they're so complex.

Point being: GMail has an HTML version; look towards the footer for that option, or in their help section. See if that goes faster. Check your speed appropriately at http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Now, test GMail and Yahoo performance in a different browser. Are you running it in Safari? Try Firefox. And vice-versa. Might you be running any debug tools? (Not if you're not a developer who installed them yourself; they don't just appear.)

If all other web traffic is operating properly, AND it's not a problem for your PC, then it's truly not SBC PacBell's fault.

Occasionally, GMail will lose its connection and have trouble reestablishing it if there hasn't been a full page refresh in awhile. I imagine you don't get to the point where that would occur at a coffee shop. What fixes it for the most amount of time? And again, what browser are you running?
posted by disillusioned at 12:48 PM on October 21, 2007

Here's 5 things I would check to help narrow it down.

1) host files on the macs. Maybe you have something weird in there.
2) what DNS servers are you using? Be sure that you are using the same ones on your macs that you're using on your pc.
3) ping yahoo.com, google.com, youtube.com, etc. and compare response times.
3.5) The IP addresses you get from google should be geographically near to you, you can check by using a geoIP website.
4) traceroute yahoo.com, google.com, youtube.com, etc. This might yield some useful information about where the slowdown is, if it's not on your network.
5) settings on your router, including firewall rules and QoS.

You don't indicate which OS you're on, so I can't give more specific advice on how to go about checking these things.

(On preview, the 'try a different browser' advice is good also.)
posted by philomathoholic at 12:50 PM on October 21, 2007

Realistically this is almost certainly just lag from the process of the script loading, retrieving data then rendering it.

The time difference across systems will vary based on:
1. network latency and available bandwidth (should be practically the same across your lan unless one of the computers is connecting over an overly long crappy cable or a poor wifi connection).
2. System resources (cpu speed and utilization, available RAM)
3. Browser (different implementations of ECMA Script, different rendering engines)

If any of these three are different across the scenarios of differing performance you describe, the difference most likely accounts for, well, the difference.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 1:16 PM on October 21, 2007

After checking the new yahoo! interface, I definitely think it might have something to do with all the ajax yahoo! and gmail are using. I'm using yahoo mail classic, which doesn't have nearly that much ajax stuff. You might try switching if the heavily ajaxified version is currently unusable for you.
posted by philomathoholic at 1:53 PM on October 21, 2007

I don't know if this has anything to do with it or not because I haven't had issues with Gmail, but are you using the Macs over a wireless connection? If so, and if the PC is hardwired to the network, it may be your wireless base station or router. Maybe it can't handle the back-and-forth from Gmail/Yahoo as fast as a wired Ethernet connection can.

If the base station/router is old, maybe an upgrade to a newer, faster one would help.
posted by lambchop1 at 2:27 PM on October 21, 2007