Ask HN: Is Google really slow right now? (or is it just for me?)

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(or is it just for me?)

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its slow for me too. not just google.com, but google-related services. doubleclick ads, analytics, etc.

edit: seems to be back up to full speed for me now.

Yeah, everything; maps, gmail, etc!
Youtube too.
Yea same for us. We also discovered our ISP was routing all google related traffic to Japan first.
Same here:

ping google.com PING google.com (74.125.67.100): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 74.125.67.100: icmp_seq=34 ttl=40 time=330.224 ms .... ^C --- google.com ping statistics --- 247 packets transmitted, 14 packets received, 94% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 294.648/313.224/331.038/13.395 ms

Yep, and half of the sites I'm trying to visit are affected as well, probably from Google Analytics or any of the other dozens of Google things everywhere.
Another proof that Google is steadily becoming the SPOF of the web...
I was having problems with AWS (very slow; too slow for development). I don't know if it was just Google.
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They've also been denying service to requests that "look automated" more often lately. I assume that's an automatic response to a DDoS - must be a growing problem for them.
I've had a ton of these lately. I've read that some people using Google App Engine have had it on their apps, which seriously degrades the halo IMO.
Google services has been steadily getting slower and slower for me. I can't recall the last time when google maps loaded the entire map successfully: 1-3 fragments are always missing.

I also stopped using gmail and switched to Mail.app. Gmail completely deteriorated for me: too often I'd press "Send" and it would just sit there forever with "Still working..." on top.

GMail has sucked for me in this and other ways too for months now, but right now everything seems fine (all Google services).

Perhaps, I was a little late to the party.

Actually, this reminds me that the time seems ripe for the next big steps in browser-based E-mail, the next product that can take GMail's features like lots of storage and mostly search as a starting point. My conjecture is that lots of people are tired of GMail sucking and would give other web clients a shot. And it might take a while before good service returns to GMail (if ever) given the rumors about the hairy state of the code base.

Anyone know of anything that I should take a look at?

OpenDNS was having issues resolving Google yesterday. It looks like at least part of the problem today is DNS related. Anyone else experiencing that?
I read something about that and stopped using OpenDNS yesterday. I felt my speed improve, especially when opening Gmail. But you know, could be in my mind.
disabling google analytics on our site for now.
hmm.. maybe the reason I can't checkout anything from googlecode.
it's fast (ok like usual) here in Tunisia
Here in Europe (Poland) it's also very slow. I was convinced it was a problem with my ISP, but now it is getting scary.
Scary? You must have a great life--on my list of scary things Google running slowly doesn't even register. They're having some latency issues and have no doubt dispatched people to work on it. Business as usual.
Scary is the fact of how dependent I am on this single company. They have my e-mails, they have my jabber account, they have some of my documents, they host the stats of my websites, people find my stuff using their search engine... Not to mention that my job becomes radically more difficult without the search (how am I supposed to find new libraries I need and documentation, hm?).

I usually don't realize all this stuff until something goes wrong (eg. they have latency problems). When everything just works having Google feels as natural as having fresh air or fresh water...

And yes, thank you, I have a great life :-)

The thing is, would you do better if you host all your stuff yourself?

I know I wouldn't - so far Gmail has been down far less than my own mail server. Every now and then an update on my server breaks some stuff and I have to spend a few hours of my precious time fixing it. So far Google has saved me more time and hassle than when I host stuff myself, even with all the Google downtime.

Even site that have google ads are now effected. Just tried to do to Techcrunch.com and it is hung on the loading of doubleclick ads and pagesyndication.

I also noticed for the last few days the formatting of my google search results are broken. The first result's title is off to the right after the ebay logo.

Maybe Wolfram Alpha is fighting dirty :)
It would be more likely to be Google fighting dirty, casually reminding everyone who owns the Internet, and how it would be a shame if some kind of an accident were to happen to it, such a pretty Internet that it is.
Yes, yes it is. I thought it was the apocalypse or a really bad firewall rule.
It's funny I needed to get directions, and I'm just realizing now that I can use Yahoo maps (an hour later).

Update: Nevermind, Yahoo maps just erases the addresses I entered when I press "go". I guess I'm stuck waiting for google maps to come back. I refuse to revert to mapquest.

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Funny thing... I just realized that without Google I am kind of cut off from the world: no e-mail, no jabber... I do have some backup accounts, but the people with whom I'd like to communicate don't... Or at least I don't know their secondary addresses. It's scary. Well, at least I have HN to cheer me up :-)
It started yesterday for me, not today. Probably about 2:30 pacific time. I noticed some rather intense latency on loading gmail.
Anyone remember that article about how (some ridiculously small amount of time) affected google and made them lose money?
[…] when Google compared search results pages with 10, 20, and 30 results per page, Mayer said the company found that putting 30 results on a page led to one-fifth fewer searches. Analyzing the data, she said that latency -- the subsecond delay caused by serving more results -- drove the decline.

"Users really care about speed," Mayer said. "They really respond to speed."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArti...

Couldn't the decline in "searches" also just be because more users were finding what they needed in the first page of results?
I'm pretty sure they would have factored that in to the study. Google is very good at counting which link you clicked, and how long it took you to find it.
in China, slow. First I thought it may be the great firewall. But it seems far more worse than that..
It seems like everything's back to normal now.
No problem for me any time this morning (United States Central Time Zone).