4 ms·

Kind of ironic: "Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears"

ska 11y ago
No. It would be ironic is if it stopped working at all with no notification. As it is they are just demonstrating competence at scaling.
nostrademons 11y ago
Incidentally, that's part of scalability: knowing when you can drop functionality and the user won't care. For Google Docs, it's highly unlikely that a file with 1000s of viewers is actively being edited by 1000s of users, and more likely the link just got shared on the Internet. So you can drop edit functionality for everyone but the original author and they won't care. Another example - one that I've heard second-hand - is how Facebook gets consistency on the news feed. Apparently your own writes to Facebook are sent separately to a write-aside cache, and then the webserver merges them back in whenever you view a page. As a result, Facebook is always strongly-consistent when it comes to your comments (you'll never post something and then fail to see it show up), but it's only eventually-consistent with respect to other peoples' comments. But then, you won't know about or care about the latter, because how would you know that you're not seeing something they posted?
- patio11 11y ago
  Same at LinkedIn. (Source: presentation by their then-CEO at JavaOne, circa 2009.)
- Rainymood 11y ago
  That's really smart. Never noticed a thing. Awesome :)
mason55 11y ago
This is actually a really good example of the CAP theorem. Because of the way Docs merges updates to a single document they had to either tie an editable document to a single machine or risk inconsistent updates. The choice was made to ensure consistency. If a doc gets too popular to be served off a single machine then it goes into read-only mode and gets distributed to multiple boxes. When the traffic dies down it can fall back to a single box and re-enter read/write mode.

ska 11y ago

No. It would be ironic is if it stopped working at all with no notification. As it is they are just demonstrating competence at scaling.

nostrademons 11y ago

Incidentally, that's part of scalability: knowing when you can drop functionality and the user won't care. For Google Docs, it's highly unlikely that a file with 1000s of viewers is actively being edited by 1000s of users, and more likely the link just got shared on the Internet. So you can drop edit functionality for everyone but the original author and they won't care. Another example - one that I've heard second-hand - is how Facebook gets consistency on the news feed. Apparently your own writes to Facebook are sent separately to a write-aside cache, and then the webserver merges them back in whenever you view a page. As a result, Facebook is always strongly-consistent when it comes to your comments (you'll never post something and then fail to see it show up), but it's only eventually-consistent with respect to other peoples' comments. But then, you won't know about or care about the latter, because how would you know that you're not seeing something they posted?

patio11 11y ago
Same at LinkedIn. (Source: presentation by their then-CEO at JavaOne, circa 2009.)
Rainymood 11y ago
That's really smart. Never noticed a thing. Awesome :)

mason55 11y ago

This is actually a really good example of the CAP theorem. Because of the way Docs merges updates to a single document they had to either tie an editable document to a single machine or risk inconsistent updates. The choice was made to ensure consistency. If a doc gets too popular to be served off a single machine then it goes into read-only mode and gets distributed to multiple boxes. When the traffic dies down it can fall back to a single box and re-enter read/write mode.