Fetching messages from Google's IMAP server has suddenly become slow

[ntauth]

Hello everyone, I have a job that runs at a regular interval (every ~15s) to fetch messages from an inbox that my service account has access to. I connect to imap.gmail.com and issue IMAP FETCH commands to fetch at most 50 messages per job run. What used to be a job that basically never failed has now started to show significant, sporadic latency spikes (20+ seconds for one FETCH), which causes the job to time out. Has anything changed recently in gmail's IMAP server that may have caused the sudden perf degradaton? 

[CaptainPatrick]

Maybe you should check the rate at which the IMAP connections are being made. Gmail tends to throttle activities when you exceed their rate limits. What happens when you do this on another account?