Gmail 2.0 performance issues

The new Gmail 2.0 interface kills the performance of my Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop running FreeBSD 6.2 with the Fluxbox-0.1.14 x11 window manager and the Firefox 1.5 web browser.

Using /usr/bin/top shows the difference. Once Gmail 2.0 loads up and the initial load spike settles down 'top' shows CPU activity between 10-30%. Switching back to Gmail's Older Version drops the CPU down under 2%. Also, I configured /usr/local/bin/pine to use the Gmail IMAP interface (gmail -> Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP), in the meantime, so I can read my email w/o Firefox.

I hadn't noticed the performance issue at work where I run FreeBSD on a dual AMD64 platform. However on my ~10 year old Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop Gmail 2.0 sucks the life out of the PII CPU.

$ uname -a
FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p9 FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p9 #0 Thu Nov 29 04:07:33 UTC 2007 root@i386-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/src/sys/GENERIC i386

$ dmesg | egrep "CPU|MB"
CPU: Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron (397.05-MHz 686-class CPU)
real memory = 134152192

Also, it appears the new Gmail interface is buggy. In fact, while typing this entry the browser (Firefox 1.5) crashed and left a nice core file for me in my /home directory. Apparently, according to PC World, I'm not alone in my complaints.