Abstract. We establish the global well-posedness of the derivative nonlinear Schrödinger equation with periodic boundary condition in the Sobolev space H 1 2 , provided that the mass of initial data is less than 4π. This result matches the one by Miao, Wu, and Xu and its recent mass threshold improvement by Guo and Wu in the non-periodic setting. Below H 1 2 , we show that the uniform continuity of the solution map on bounded subsets of H s does not hold, for any gauge equivalent equation.