Performance Update: Groove is 428.65% faster

If you’ve logged into Groove over the last couple months, you might have noticed we’ve been quietly releasing small incremental improvements.

Each of these releases has been quite small, but they add up to something big. And two weeks ago, we launched one of the final tweaks to these small improvements.

We’re thrilled to announce that the Groove inbox now loads 428.65% faster.

Yes, that’s not a typo… It’s 428.65% faster!

Okay okay, I know the percentage looks great—but what does that mean for actual load times?

This means—for an average email thread, on an average account—the email load speeds decreased a staggering 763 milliseconds (ms) to 178ms.

This holds true for most emails that have less than 20 replies in them (and after that, the speeds are still great).

Here’s a quick table showing you the numbers:

This is where our customer support team stops me and says, “Nick, this is great, but everything is relative. What’s considered good for load speed?”

Specifically for email, anything below 350ms is considered good. Anything below 250ms is great. Sub 200ms is world class (that’s Gmail territory).

Once you are below the 250ms mark, it’s pretty much perceived as instant. The 250-400ms range feels fast-ish, and anything higher than 400ms feels sluggish.

Again, the support team chimes in, “Why is this important for our customers?”

Economics. If you shave a couple hundred milliseconds (yes, milliseconds) off each email, your team can save HOURS.

That’s right, average teams can gain back hours of actual work time just on the improvements we’ve made on the load speeds.

I’ll use an example and some quick math to explain.

These numbers are based on:

• Average number of daily emails: 150
• Load time improvement: 600 milliseconds +/- (let’s keep the math simple)

Amazing, right?!

And while we love looking at the numbers (or maybe I’m the only one that does), we needed to validate this with our customers.

So we sent a survey out about two weeks ago asking how the performance has been lately and got some amazing feedback.

92% of Groove customers say the inbox feels faster.

The remaining amount said it feels about the same. And a small percentage still think there are additional improvements to be made (we’re on it!).

Here are some of our favorite responses:

“The inbox loads instantly – productivity is up :)”

- Gideon Baker, Customer Success Manager, Tablet Troubles

“Every click feels instant now. Before it used to take a bit of time. Honestly I love Groove.”

- Angela Rohner, Head of Customer Experience, BuySellAds

“Groove feels significantly faster and more reliable now than it used to.”

- Dries Oeyen, IT Manager, BeWell Innovations

“Much more stable and very fast! Nice work team :)”

- Keith Rickett, CEO of Coin

We’re still working on performance improvements to other parts of the app.

For instance, we’ve got the email list loading to an acceptable 350ms on an average folder, but there is still some ground to cover on that side.

Plus, we’re prioritizing some very exciting performance improvements to the reply editor. Stay tuned for these updates in the new year!