Comments on: As More People Use Google Services, Is Google Able To Handle The Load?

By: As More People Use Google Services, Is Google Able To Handle The Load? - Gmail Blog

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:54:04 +0000

[...] This article is featured on the custom Gmail Blog at Auto-Blogs.us. [...]

By: Google outage and credibility « How I see the world

Google outage and credibility « How I see the world — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:57:43 +0000

[...] Google outage and credibility Ron Schenone at Lockergnome writes and article asking if, with an increasing number of people using Google services, Google is till able to handle the load (full article at http://wp3.lockergnome.com/blade/2009/09/02/as-more-people-use-google-services-is-google-able-to-han...). [...]

By: Hotrao

Hotrao — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:56:25 +0000

I add a couple of points for disussion:

a) on one side I think that Google like any other business is facing the problem of optimizing costs and this reflects also on having a structure dimensioned everytime “on the hedge” with little space for errors
b) on the other side I’m little bit worried on the fact that Google engineers talk about having “we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes”: Google engineers are human and can make mistakes, but what if the error in estimates was not slight but big?
c)) We are relying too heavily on network infrastructure: in other times if Google went down, we would have said “I’ll try again later” , while everybody is now acting like the outage was the outage of a nuclear plant

By: Ron Schenone

Ron Schenone — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:34:10 +0000

Hi Marc,
Thanks for the info.
I have a MSN account and I expect it to fail, which it does about once a week. My ISP account fails on average about once a month.

IMHO Google needs to be held to a higher standard. Failure is not an option.

By: the oracle

the oracle — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:59:32 +0000

Ron, I have been with Hotmail, from Microsoft, in one form or another, since 1997. It has had outages, or periods of overburdened activity (which for me, is the same thing) for 5-7 hours many times, yet it seems to get a pass.

Now I am not faulting Microsoft, or Google, it happens. That is one area however, where Microsoft seems to get absolutely no criticism whatsoever. Really odd.

That is why I have more than 1 e-mail account. Heck, the Verizon mail server, which that provider wonders why I use so little, is down monthly, almost like clock work … and they wonder?

I just got a Google Voice number, and the choices of custom numbers were fairly slim. Now you were wondering about services overburdening the system?

I fully expect problems; it is the nature of things, and also of anything touched by humans.