4 ms·
> Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears. Hopefully the irony isn't lost on the readers of this document :)
by david_shaw 11y ago
> Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears.
Hopefully the irony isn't lost on the readers of this document :)
- DannyBee 11y agoWhat irony? To me, this isn't irony at all. It shows that google can't defeat the algorithmic complexity of things like consensus and shared state editing, and so gracefully degrades functionality. That shows a very good understanding of scaling - realizing any solution you choose has limits and tradeoffs, and thinking about and handling those limit cases sanely ahead-of-time, rather than waiting for it to fall over and hoping for the best.
- munin 11y agoI got an error message saying the document wasn't available at all and to come back after the "crowd clears" which is much more ironic... after I refreshed a bunch it became available...
- pjungwir 11y agoI think it has more to do with preventing concurrent writes stepping on each other. Google Docs must be the number one example of real-world systems doing Operational Transformation [1]. It's not like HN is bring down Google's servers. Incidentally OT is another example of the value of in-sync clocks, for those asking about that elsewhere in this thread. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation