Is your Gmail slow? It can’t be Google, it must be me. Well, maybe not. A wide variety of people are reporting Gmail performance problems over the last few months.

Fred Wilson: Gmail Performance Issues

I thought my issues were my own…… I suffered in silence.

Gabriel Weinberg: Gmail Has Become Unusably Slow

Gmail has gotten slower and slower for me, and as of the last few weeks it has become unusably slow. Before you ask, yes, I’ve tried it across lots of browsers and computers.

Apparently they are not alone in having these slowness issues. In response, hundreds of comments poured, as one can see from Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, Hacker News, etc.

A wide range of these comments provide tips in trying to figure out why. The suggestions range from DNS issues (did DNS resolve to the wrong Gamil server?), network speed(try a different network provider?), browser speed (have you tried other browsers?), computer speed (time for a new computer?), “you are having too many emails”, “try to disable Gmail add-on widgets one by one”, to “can I get a new gmail server?”.

We all want our web applications to be fast. It is just no easy task to make it fast, and it is not easy task to figure out why things aren’t fast.

At Yottaa, we want to provide a service to help people figure out “why my web application is slow”. We see these problems all over the web. Not even Google is immune. When problems happen, there are very few helpers available to figure out why besides wild guessing.

There are lots of factors impacting a web application’s performance from an end user perspective. At Yottaa, we analyze “reachability”, “Page load time”, “time to render”, “time to display”, “complexity”, “optimization levels”, help identify page level issues against widget level issues (in particular, third party widgets), and try to pinpoint client side performance, network issue and server side issues. We monitor hundreds of thousands of sites, compare and benchmark their performance continuously, and hope to provide a useful service to facilitate a better Internet experience for everyone.

In the end, anyone can use Yottaa Performance Analytics to figure out exactly what is wrong for any web application. Should Gmail have performance issues again, we certainly hope that Fred can just take a look at Yottaa Performance Analytics service and say “a ha!”. Are we there yet? We are still work in progress. Stay tuned.