Google's Todd Jackson carries the weight of the web on his shoulders. As the product manager for Gmail, it's his responsibility to make sure your inbox experience is fast, secure and always available. Jackson is also the product manager for Buzz, Google's real-time social sharing system that launched in February and was promptly criticized over privacy issues and its "noise" problem. Talk about a tough gig. We got the chance to ask Jackson about the inner workings of the Gmail team, what's ahead for Buzz as far as user controls, and what it feels like to bear the collective rage of Gmail's 140-million-plus users when the system takes a dive.

Google的Todd Jackson是一個(gè)重?fù)?dān)在肩的人，他是Gmail的產(chǎn)品經(jīng)理，人們稱他Gmail先生。他的職責(zé)是保證這個(gè)擁有1億4000萬(wàn)用戶的郵件系統(tǒng)有良好的體驗(yàn)，快速，安全，可靠。Jackson 同時(shí)是 Google 實(shí)時(shí)社區(qū)分享系統(tǒng)Buzz（類(lèi)似于facebook，人人和開(kāi)心）的產(chǎn)品經(jīng)理，這個(gè)系統(tǒng)曾一度因隱私問(wèn)題遭受非議。本文是Webmonkey對(duì)Todd Jackson的一次訪談。

Webmonkey: Do you think we're going to see the death of the desktop e-mail client anytime soon?

Webmonkey: 在你看來(lái)，Email 桌面客戶端是否會(huì)很快消亡？

Todd Jackson: We don't like to think of it that way (laughs). No comment! Seriously, though, we think deploying an app in the browser is something that easily makes sense to users now. They can log in on any computer, all their stuff is in the cloud. It's just easier. And for us, we can push frequent updates and improve the product iteratively. At Google, we run our own business on Gmail — we call this "eating our own dog food."

Todd Jackson: 我們不愿意那樣想問(wèn)題（笑），沒(méi)有什么可說(shuō)的。嚴(yán)格來(lái)講，通過(guò)瀏覽器分發(fā)應(yīng)用程序?qū)θ缃竦挠脩魜?lái)說(shuō)很 合理，他們只需登錄一下，所有東西都在云端，這樣更容易，對(duì)我們來(lái)說(shuō)，我們希望通過(guò)定期更新不斷改善這個(gè)產(chǎn)品。Google 自己也用 Gmail，這叫"吃自己的狗糧"。

Webmonkey: So do you suffer the same service outages as the general public?

Webmonkey: 那你們也和公眾用戶一樣受宕機(jī)之困？

Jackson: We do. When Gmail goes down, it goes down for us. That's one of our first alerts.

Jackson: 是的，當(dāng) Gmail 宕機(jī)，我們也深受其累。

Webmonkey: What happens in your office at Google when Gmail goes down?

Webmonkey: 當(dāng) Gmail 宕機(jī)，Google 內(nèi)部是什么樣子？

Jackson: Everybody freaks out (laughs). Our Site Reliability Engineers — SREs, whose job it is to keep the servers alive — have extensive monitoring systems. They have this giant wall of dashboards that chart the system health. They also carry pagers. Even in a very small outage that only affects 0.01 percent of users, the SRE guys will get paged. They run to the dashboards and figure out what's gone wrong. In a larger outage, we all switch to an alternate communications channel like IRC. We also use the bug reporting system inside Google to communicate during outages.

Jackson: 每個(gè)人都很崩潰（笑）。我們負(fù)責(zé)維護(hù)站點(diǎn)的工程師們，擁有很昂貴的監(jiān)控系統(tǒng)，一整面墻的儀表，可以看到整個(gè)系統(tǒng)健康狀況，他們還佩戴尋呼裝置，哪怕極小范圍的宕機(jī)，哪怕只影響 0.01% 的用戶，他們也會(huì)得到消息。他們跑向監(jiān)控墻，看看什么地方出了問(wèn)題，我們便臨時(shí)使用別的溝通渠道，比如 IRC 聊天，我們還使用 BUG 報(bào)告系統(tǒng)溝通。

Our response time has gotten much better. But we definitely feel the pain. When Gmail goes down, that's one of the worst feelings in the world.

我們的反應(yīng)時(shí)間已經(jīng)很好了，但我們自己能親身感受其痛苦，因此，Gmail 宕機(jī)對(duì)我們就跟天塌了一樣。

Webmonkey: I completely agree.

Webmonkey: 完全同意。

Jackson: The outages we've had, we've learned from, and it's made the system better as a result. For example, we changed things so one component going down can't bring down the system as a whole. Gmail used to be reliant on the Contacts system, so when Conacts was unavailable, Gmail would be unavailable. We changed it so that won't happen anymore.

Jackson: 我們自己感受宕機(jī)的痛苦，這讓系統(tǒng)變得越來(lái)越好。比如，我們做了調(diào)整，當(dāng)一個(gè)部件出問(wèn)題，不會(huì)影響整個(gè)系統(tǒng)，Gmail 曾經(jīng)依賴我們的聯(lián)系人系統(tǒng)，如果聯(lián)系人系統(tǒng)宕機(jī)，Gmail 也宕機(jī)，我們對(duì)此做了調(diào)整。

We've also gotten better at communicating with users. We built something called the Google Apps Status dashboard. Every day, we log anything that went wrong with the system. It answers that question, "Is Gmail down for me or is it down for everyone?"

在和用戶溝通方面我們也有改善，我們?cè)O(shè)計(jì)了一個(gè)叫做 Google Apps Status dashboard （Google 應(yīng)用狀況儀表盤(pán)）的程序，每一天，我們都記錄那些有問(wèn)題的東西，這樣我們就知道 Gmail 是個(gè)別宕機(jī)還是整體宕機(jī)。

Webmonkey: How much effort do you put into improving Gmail's speed and performance?

Webmonkey: 在改善 Gmail 速度和性能方面你們做了多少努力？

Jackson: Performance is huge. We think of it as a feature. Speed is the best feature your product can have.

Jackson: 性能方面的投入是巨大的，我們把速度看作功能，速度是你產(chǎn)品最好的功能。

Last year Google introduced these performance enhancements to Picasa to make flipping through photos faster, and the usage more than doubled. When a site gets twice as fast, it often gets more than twice as much usage.

去年，我們我們?yōu)?Picasa 做了性能優(yōu)化，用戶瀏覽相片的速度翻了一倍，結(jié)果用戶也翻了一倍，當(dāng)一個(gè)站點(diǎn)快了一倍，他的用戶量的增加會(huì)超過(guò)這個(gè)。

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