Why is hotmail so much slower than gmail?

Nemanja Trifunovic

Fabio Franco wrote:

What experiences do you have with both GMail and Hotmail?

I use both from my desktop e-mail client unless I really have to use the web front-ends for some reason. Life is too short for web-based e-mail...

utf8-cpp

Pualee

Fabio Franco wrote:

I thought about location, but with my 10Mbps connection, I beleive that wouldn't be the case.

Your connection has nothing to do with the speeds beyond your ISP. You're limited by the slowest hop in the connection. I think normally there are around 10 - 15 hops between any two nodes (try tracert to the gmail and hotmail and you can see the routes if not blocked). I suspect the difference is the software architecture, google has always been based around scalable algorithms, and hotmail existed long long ago. Hotmail probably is having to work through older software and hardware architectures that have not scaled as well as necessary to handle the boom in internet availability. And it's spam filters have always been useless. I stopped using it a decade ago.

Fabio Franco

Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:

Life is too short for web-based e-mail...

I find GMail web based interface almost as fast a desktop client. Never had anything to complain here, never seen the need of use of desktop client. Can't say the same for Hotmail thought

Fabio Franco

Pualee wrote:

Your connection has nothing to do with the speeds beyond your ISP.

I know that, however, if the problem was there, I would probably have similar experiences with both GMail and Hotmail and many other sites. I was just pointing out that speed on my side wasn't the problem.

Pualee wrote:

I suspect the difference is the software architecture, google has always been based around scalable algorithms, and hotmail existed long long ago. Hotmail probably is having to work through older software and hardware architectures that have not scaled as well as necessary to handle the boom in internet availability. And it's spam filters have always been useless. I stopped using it a decade ago.

That's one thing I admire of google... Everything is faster than most competition. As for hotmail, maybe you're right. I really want to hope that microsft technology isn't the one to blame, don't want to ever need to go to tomcat/apache and python/java for performance issues.

AspDotNetDev

E=MC^2 M=E/C^2 Mass is proportional to energy. If you heat up an object, it has more energy, so it becomes more massive. Massive objects have more inertia, so they require more energy to accelerate. Assuming the same amount of energy was put into Hotmail and GMail, the hotness of your mail would make it slower.

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Fabio Franco

LOL, man my e-mail should be supper ubber hot then, because I can notice the difference.

Lost User

I've never had a Hotmail account personally but I've seen others fighting using it and never saw the need. I used to have a Yahoo mail account and it seemed OK until their big Web 2.0 AJAX update where performance went into the toilet. GMail on the other hand has always been VERY fast for me. I read somewhere that Google devs in general (and GMail devs in particular) are fanatics when it comes to efficiency and speed. The rationale is - it may only be 0.1 second on this click but multiplied by millions of users each clicking thousands of times it adds up pretty quickly.

Fabio Franco

Yeah, as a performance fanatic myself, I completely agree with the 0.1 second analogy.

Chris Maunder

Right click on any given page and select Properties to view the size of the page. Take a look at how much javascript is being executed, take a look at the way it's being done, and take a look at the CSS. (Size and efficiencies of all these things) Google places a definite focus on small and fast webpages. Microsoft, historically, hasn't.

cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP

Fabio Franco

Hotmail is actually much smaller than GMail, however I noticed that only on GMail the scripts for the messages are actually on the html source code. Microsoft just have a few scripst there, I guess the problem is on the code-behind. I can't say if it's better have all the code rendered in html source or on the code behind as web development is not on my strong skills. It still boggles my mind why would anyone use hotmail instead of gmail for the main webmail client. I know lots that do and it makes no sense.

AspDotNetDev

Fabio Franco wrote:

It still boggles my mind why would anyone use hotmail instead of gmail

I am reminded of The Oatmeal.

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Steve Echols

Besides the other things people have suggested, maybe it's the graphical/flash ads? GMail has text only ads, and they're all coming from their own servers. Just a thought.

- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on! Code, follow, or get out of the way.

Fabio Franco

LOL :laugh: