Measurements - Gmail Is The Best?

Gmail has this counter on the www.gmail.com page under Lots Of Space that keeps changing to show how much free space they are offering. The last time I checked which was a few months ago, this counter was ticking at the rate of 9 millionths of 1 MB every 2 seconds. This meant that it took 61-odd hours for it to add up to 1 MB, which is just over 2.5 days. However, at the time of writing this part (20th Oct 07), I checked again to find that they have increased the counter speed by approximately 333.33 times. It averages approximately 1500 millionths of 1 MB every second, which means it takes a mere 11.11 mins to notch up 1 MB. Its currently about to touch 4092 MBs, which means by the time IST 00:00 hrs 1st Jan 2008 comes around, it would have added another 9235 MBs, taking the total capacity to 13.0 GB. However, doubt that the guys at Gmail won't change it again before that... 13.0 GB is a ridiculous amount of space to give 58 million users.

P.S. I'm surprised there are only 58 mn Gmail users... that's a little more than the number of subscribers that are with the largest telecom company in India.

Update: As of 00:00 hrs on 1st Dec 07, the speed of the counter is different, again. Now its ticking at approximately 313.33 millionths of an MB every second. This means that it takes 53.19 minutes to clock up 1 MB, and that in the month of December 2007, the counter will add just over 839 MBs to reach a total of 6194 MBs (or 6.048 GBs) by the time India gets to enter 2008.

Update to Update: If we were to assume that there has been only one change in counter speed between 20th Oct 07 and 1st Dec 07, the exact time this change happened should be approx IST 10:30 am on 23rd Oct 07. Now will someone from Google confirm? ;)


Final Update:
As of 10:00 pm on 31-Jan-07, the speed has dropped to approximately 39 millionths of an MB per second. This means that by the time 1-Feb-08 comes around in a couple of hours time, the total size of the mailbox will be 6374.847873 MBs. Working backwards towards the last recorded speed observation on 1st December 2007 (and on the basis of the assumption that the ticker speed has been changed ONLY ONCE between then and now), we find that the change must have happened around 5:26 AM on the 4th of January 2008.

Hmmm... I need to stop doing this, don't I?