Google’s web-based email service Gmail is a hell of a service although it is not open to the general public at the moment. The killer feature of it is the generous 1GB of email storage should be enough for a lifetime of email messages for the average Joe, but not it appears for Kevin Rose.
Rose decided to test the limits of the service by asking people to send him email messages with attachments of over 5MB. The results were quite astounding.
Within 5 minutes, Gmail processed over 300 mail messages (most with 5+ MB attachments). 10 minutes into the test, I started receiving various internal server error messages and was no longer able to login. Proceeded to login with other Gmail accounts to ensure this was not a site wide problem. All other accounts worked fine.
In fact the experiment may have been a little too succesful as almost immediately people who were trying to send him messages were having them bounced back.
So how many emails where sent? No way to tell for sure, but considering that our network is in 50+ million homes, that I plugged it twice, and I received over 2,000 complaints from people who actually took the time to dig around and find my personal email address, I’m thinking we hit Gmail with around 50-75,000+, 5MB+ emails in a 10-15min window.
Was this test just a bit of fun and essentially a complete waste of time, well maybe but perhaps as a byproduct it helped Google improve their service and cope with the huge load that may eventually build up when it is open to everyone to join.
Tags: internet
