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UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago* (5 children)

I would love to have some real numbers.

Emails have now days pretty large pictures and even moving things. I wonder how much companies preload mails. For example does gmail start to preload all the unread mails in the first page when i open my inbox? And if they do how much one mail needs processing power in average and how many people open their inbox everyday.

And how much of that preloading is necessary for good feeling service.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Networking is remarkably efficient, and so is decoding images, because processors do it so quickly. For more intensive tasks like video, hardware decoders make them efficient. All email is to the client computer is making a request for data, processing that into a list that can be displayed, and displaying it. I'm pretty sure just having the screen on is orders of magnitude more power hungry.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah i know it is efficient. That does not chance the fact i would like to know the numbers.

    Also client side is only the client side. I bet email services have plenty of SSR that start to happen the moment you are in the login window.

    Im dont belive it has any real effect. Im just curious to hear any numbers so i dont need to trust my feelings and i can operate on facts.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Given the difference in server CPU/memory/storage/network/scale, I don't think it's possible to get any number with confidence. Maybe you could self host, but that wouldn't be representative of real email servers. Plus different email providers handle emails differently.

    And cloud providers probably automatically scale with load, Gmail probably uses more power during work hours than after.

    Also SSR is relatively new and email services are ancient, I'd be surprised if any used it. I'm not even sure if it's a good idea for email.

    Plus it would probably vary with how many emails you have in your inbox...

    I just don't think it's possible to get an actual number.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    They're not preloading your emails, just making it look like it, by preloading a few fields (from, subject). Providers have to pay for every byte they send, so they make damn sure they're not sending a bunch of extraneous data, at scale, for millions of users.

    Specifically for "old emails" in my mind, these are emails you'd have to dig for. The act of digging up the old emails will be much more data intensive than leaving them sit, which draws no power. Your old emails aren't kept in RAM.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yes. Thank you for explaining it like i dont understand.

    And yes atleas google is preloading emails. You can test it easily.

    Open your gmail in browser. It shows you 50 first mails. Then disconnect your internet. You can open any of the 50 mails and read them in full. Even the large pictures load.

    Also if you click from the "next page" arrow the 50 mail set you are in will open after disconnectin no matter how far you have gone in the history.

    This works even with pc you are logging in the first time.

    The speed this is happening is also good indicator there is server side preloading happening in addition to client side things.

    So i say again. I would love to have some real numbers how much there is happening on the behind and with how many users. I feel like it is really insignificant total in the grand picture of the things, but it would be nice to know things instead of just feeling.

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