WebProNews

Lessons learned apply to other sites too

The "Loading..." message may never go away completely, but engineers at Google made some Gmail improvements that should diminish its on-screen time.

"All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up."
-- Like that loading message, Norma Desmond doesn't want to leave the screen forever, Sunset Blvd.

Gmail annihilated the old standards of webmail when it arrived a few years ago. Its 1GB inbox dwarfed the meager rationing of storage space by other providers like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, who had to spring for more hard drives lest they lose people to Gmail.

But Gmail can be maddeningly slow, or at least perceived that way, to get from the login screen to the actual inbox. It's a situation Google hoped to address with some recent testing and tweaks, as noted on the official Gmail blog.

Their testing found room for improvement, even though the service makes relatively few requests to the server to bring up someone's inbox. "We reduced the weight of each request itself by eliminating or narrowing the scope of some of our cookies. We made sure that all our images were cacheable by the browser, and we consolidated small icon images into single meta-images, a technique known as spriting," Google's Wiltse Carpenter wrote.

Many requests became fewer requests. Carpenter said it now takes as few as four HTTP requests to bring a visitor from the front page of Gmail to the inbox.

Carpenter noted some tools they used that other web developers may find useful in making similar diagnoses. HttpWatch, WireShark, and Fiddler received mentions, alongside Google's internal tools.

Those tools and attentive testing should be of use to other webmasters. With Google demanding better landing page performance of their advertising clients, any site publishers who's fallen behind on speeding things up should find Google's Gmail experience instructive.