Skip to main content

Switching to Cloud only email

4 years ago I was a windows guy and used to use outlook for emails. Though I used gmail for personal accounts when it comes to office emails somehow I liked the native look and feel and offline nature of outlook.  Then I joined the startup and the development environment was ubuntu so I first started using thunderbird but then moved to evolution. Now evolution  had its own problems but again it was native and i was using it mainly as a task management. Daily emails would flow in via pop/imap and I would keep a copy of them on server. Then as and when I would  reply to an email or took action on it I would move  it to a folder by year. But evolution used to suck, it had performance issues handling 2000+emails so I started deleting emails to trash but again it had performance issues. But I kept using it as I could integrate gmail calendar and it would notify me about events and contacts were offline so when I was on aeroplane I could use it.

Then I moved to ubuntu 12.04 and again evolution had its own set of issues it would hog the CPU and fan would go crazy, last  week I got tired of it and thought let again try to follow the same model with gmail and using it. So first thing I did is downloaded chrome and downloaded both gmail and calendar offline apps and I changed my workflow to if I took action on email I would mark it as read else mark it as unread.  Calendar and gmail has this desktop notifications so I enabled it also.

The only issue I have faced so far is randomly it would be slow for me and the browser will keep saying  I am disconnected whereas other sites would work fine. Also may times sending emails would take 1+ minutes. But so far I am liking it and life is good and back to normal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Killing a particular Tomcat thread

Update: This JSP does not work on a thread that is inside some native code.  On many occasions I had a thread stuck in JNI code and it wont work. Also in some cases thread.stop can cause jvm to hang. According to javadocs " This method is inherently unsafe. Stopping a thread with Thread.stop causes it to unlock all of the monitors that it has locked". I have used it only in some rare occasions where I wanted to avoid a system shutdown and in some cases we ended up doing system shutdown as jvm was hung so I had a 70-80% success with it.   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We had an interesting requirement. A tomcat thread that was spawned from an ExecutorService ThreadPool had gone Rogue and was causing lots of disk churning issues. We cant bring down the production server as that would involve downtime. Killing this thread was harmless but how to kill it, t
6 comments
Read more

Adding Jitter to cache layer

Thundering herd is an issue common to webapp that rely on heavy caching where if lots of items expire at the same time due to a server restart or temporal event, then suddenly lots of calls will go to database at same time. This can even bring down the database in extreme cases. I wont go into much detail but the app need to do two things solve this issue. 1) Add consistent hashing to cache layer : This way when a memcache server is added/removed from the pool, entire cache is not invalidated.  We use memcahe from both python and Java layer and I still have to find a consistent caching solution that is portable across both languages. hash_ring and spymemcached both use different points for server so need to read/test more. 2) Add a jitter to cache or randomise the expiry time: We expire long term cache  records every 8 hours after that key was added and short term cache expiry is 2 hours. As our customers usually comes to work in morning and access the cloud file server it can happe
Post a Comment
Read more

Preparing for an interview after being employed 11 years at a startup

I would say I didn't prepared a hell lot but  I did 2 hours in night every day and every weekend around 8 hours for 2-3 months. I did 20-30 leetcode medium problems from this list https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/top-interview-questions-medium/.  I watched the first 12 videos of Lecture Videos | Introduction to Algorithms | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWare I did this course https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview I researched on topics from https://www.educative.io/courses/java-multithreading-for-senior-engineering-interviews and leetcode had around 10 multithreading questions so I did those I watched some 10-20 videos from this channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1XnDWhsLS5URXTi5wtFTA 
Post a Comment
Read more