Wednesday, May 14, 2008

GMail got faster, one trick that they didn't tell us

GMail got even faster and here are some details about how they did it :
Official Gmail Blog: A need for speed: the path to a faster loading sequence

One trick that the obviosouly did, but didn't tell us, is that they send your user name asynchronously in the background as soon as you enter the password field.
This is a GMail specific optimization. It's not available on the generic Google account page (yet?) .

My guess is that they prefetch some stuff under the assumption that most logon attempts will work. Even if the password is wrong, they minimum work, that has to be done is to check whether the account is there.

The funny thing is, that I've seen this just a few days ago, when I checked how much data Google Mail sends, to get a better feeling what would a good goal for a high performance Web application.

Regards,
Markus

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just like any GWT-like web-app would probably be written. As long as there is no security leak, this should be fine.

Unknown said...

Hi "anonymous",
Just to make it clear.
I think it's a clever trick that thy implemented very well.

There should not be a security issue by just sending the login name in advance.

Regards,
Markus

Add Font in Menubar said...

I think, even facebook implements the same authentication mechanism...Pretty clever !