Is Google Mail faltering under its load?

Its webmail user experience appears to be degrading with respect to response times. It becomes appallingly slow often. I despise webmail interfaces, and therefore much prefer to use IMAP4 (or POP3). I have been content with Google Mail’s IMPA4 access until recently when I started to face a class of problems that have persisted across two different providers I have switched between. Occasionally connections to their IMAP4 servers would time out; frequently, connections would get rejected with a “too many simultaneous connections” response. Google Mail has been thoughtful enough to share mitigation instructions to work around the latter problem, but sadly, those have not worked for me.

Google IM has been having a set of problems of its own. If you have not been paying close attention to your IM client, you would have missed the cycle of disconnects and reconnects Google IM service tends to fall into occasionally. This behaviour is not limited to using third-party IM applications or Google’s Talk IM application, but also prevalent in the webmail-based chat interface. When it is not an issue with the SSL certificate being erroneous, the file sharing functionality would start acting up. In fact, file transfer is almost elusive with Google’s IM services. As far as I know, file transfer support is solid in many Jabber implementations; I cannot understand why Google has not been able to get it right with its IM services.

I am happy that Google is busy integrating and introducing new features frequently into their Mail and Chat services. But are they doing that at the expense of letting the basic functionalities fall apart every now and then?