Posts Tagged ‘Gmail’
More on today’s Gmail issue
September 1st, 2009 | 
Author: Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.
However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.
The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.
What’s next: We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there’s a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn’t affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We’ll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html
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Gmail users suffer through outage
Gmail went offline Tuesday for some users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Gmail users were unable to get to their accounts on Monday as an outage struck the Google e-mail service.
“We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail,” Google said at 11:12 a.m. PDT on its Google Apps status dashboard after it discovered the error.
At 11:28 a.m., some good news arrived: “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future.”
However, two hours later, the problems persisted for some, and the Twittersphere was abuzz with griping.
The problems appeared to affect the Web-based version of the service, but accounts could be reached using third-party e-mail software that used the IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, interface.
Gmail is used by tens of millions of people, and its fast growth carried it past AOL’s e-mail service into third place, according to ComScore.
Google didn’t immediately comment on the scope and cause of the outage. It’s not the first Gmail outage this year.
Google Apps customers, who pay $50 per user per year, get extensions of their service contracts, if their services are down for longer than a certain duration. The dashboard showed only mail to have troubles, not other Google Apps services, such as Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs.
Outages pose problems for Google, as it tries to persuade companies to buy into its cloud-computing vision, in which applications are hosted on the Internet rather than on corporate computers. But Google argues that its service availability is competitive with most organizations’ abilities to run their own e-mail servers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10323306-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Gmail push on iPhone? Meet GPush
The arrival of push notification in Apple’s 3.0 iPhone software whipped up excitement, though its real-world application still left users wanting more. On Monday, Tiverias Apps released GPush (iTunes link), a small (0.3MB), ninety nine cent application that fills in a gap with push notification for your Gmail account.
GPush alerts you to incoming Gmail messages with a red icon badge, a chime, and a semi-transparent alert window that reads the sender’s name and the subject line. (You can change these in the Notification settings.) The application interface itself does little, apart from collecting your login information once, and manually reregistering your credentials. All the rest works behind the scenes.
Full Story…
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10311287-233.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Source :
CNETNews Gmail push on iPhone? Meet GPush http://bit.ly/YdVJH
