For a company that makes a lot of noise about how the web should be blazing fast, Google has been awfully slow to address performance concerns in one of their flagship apps, Gmail.

Sometimes conversations can take up to 20 seconds to load.   Searches too.  Sometimes they will not load at all and a vague “This conversation could not be loaded” message will appear in your browser.

I’ve tried posting on their support forums, contacting Google Apps for Business support, tweeting @google and @dondoge.  No one seems to care.  Either that, or no one seems to be able to diagnose the issue.

I’ve spoken to many folks, and the problems aren’t just limited to me.  I’d love it for someone at Google to at least acknowledge that there are scaling issues in GMail.  Please leave a comment below if your GMail or Google Mail for Business account is slow.  Hopefully someone at google will listen!

For the record, I love Gmail and it is centric to my workflow day-to-day, which is why it’s so frustrating that no one at Google can help. If you’re reading this post from inside the GooglePlex, shoot me an email. kevin [at] ignighter [dot] com/  I’d love to help you diagnose the issue.

EDIT:  Since there’s been questions about whether or not the problem is at my end, here are my system and connection specs: I’m on a state of the art macbook air, and the problems described occur on every modern browser (chrome, firefox, safari)), and they occur on every wifi network I connect to (Cable, DSL).  No firewall.  250K conversations in my inbox using 20G of space,

UPDATE 9/5/2012 : Jack Groetzinger has a great post up today about gmail speed workarounds.

UPDATE 10/6/2012: Here are some more Gmail Slowness Fixes.