Yahoo Mail Improves Performance With Redux Changes

Yahoo Mail says it has improved its performance with an “atypical” use of Redux, the container for JavaScript apps.

For one thing, it has reduced API calls by roughly 20% and its API errors by 20% to 30%. And it has speeded up its loading time.

The email service began using Redux last year, but has since made some modifications on top of the architecture, according to a blog post by Mohit Goenka, Gnanavel Shanmugam, and Lance Welsh.

When accessing data over the Redux network, Yahoo Mail uses its API instead of the standard Thunk middleware. Thunk would “create an unnecessary and undesirable dependency between the action creators and our API,” the authors write.

In addition, it processes action payloads stored in Redux, using “action syncers.” These allow it to make requests to the API and process responses.

These changes have enabled Yahoo Mail to “reduce latencies in various operations, reduce JavaScript exceptions, and better synchronized states,” the authors state.

It is not clear whether these enhancements will help Yahoo Mail avoid the outages that have plagued it over the past several months. But it has also added some user-friendly features — for instance, RSVP cards.

According to Digital Trends, these allow the user to see and RSVP by email to events listed on the calendar. 

Another new offering is Photo Themes, which allow the user to customize their inbox theme, Digital Trends reports.

The Redux rejiggering has also resulted in these changes: 

Stability improvements 

  • When checking for new emails — 20%
  • When reading emails — 30% 
  • When sending emails — 20%

Performance improvements

  • 10% Improvement in page load performance
  • 40% improvement in frame rendering time
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