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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

My solution was to use a machine that's similar to what Googlers use. Even though devs at Google use 64GB RAM and Xeon chips, I've found that an Eight-core Ryzen chip at 4GHz with 32GB of RAM on Linux makes Gmail fly. I can run and work with Mutt efficiently on a Raspberry Pi, but I need an desktop machine to make Gmail work fast. We live in interesting times.

Gmail is unusable in my 2012 MacBook Pro. I wonder how Gmail works on low-end Chromebooks.

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I use Gmail on my 2014 Acer Chromebook C720 (2GB of RAM). Works fine. Takes a while to load initially but I leave the tab fine and it works fine for searching, reading, composing, working with labels, etc.

Same device, same year, more impatient. Just like most of the web apps I have to use (facebook,slack), it feels terribly slow compared to what I have been used to before (before what? before. the web constantly gets slower). Meanwhile, I run crouton on the same device and can do amazing stuff with blender, git, emacs, latex, python, etc.

Weird how the web allows seemingly simple task to become so performance intensive for the computer. Reading email and performing similar tasks is nothing new to the computer world (thunderbird, outlook, evolution have worked well and fast for years).

It seems that somehow, throwing more developper at a given problem (such as email interfaces) seems to only make products slower.

Maybe forcing google devs / management to use 4gb ram machines would incentise them?

Requiring 16gb or more for email is excessive.

I Agree. Programmers in general should use worse machines sometimes.

Gmail uses a ton of memory though. On a memory constrained device like a Chromebook, you'll want that memory if you're not interacting with Gmail very often.

Is it the UI that’s slow? Or the network?

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