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Having a limit of 5 million files is perfectly reasonable. Failing to document that such a limit exists and refusing to publicly confirm it (which apparently is
by mcherm 4y ago
Having a limit of 5 million files is perfectly reasonable. Failing to document that such a limit exists and refusing to publicly confirm it (which apparently is STILL the case) is extraordinarily poor customer service/communication.
Google KEEPS setting new records for poor customer communication, to the point where I (and much of the HN crowd) now expect it. Android developer banned from the app store? There is no meaningful way to appeal but you'll probably never be able to find out why. Your best hope is to post on HN and hope someone with power at Google notices.
Leadership at Google ought to recognize this; they ought to make an effort to improve the channels by which "customers" can communicate with Google. But I see no signs that they are even aware of the issue; I see no effort to change anything.
I would try to tell them but... there's no communication channel. Maybe I should post about it on HN.
- _yb2s 4y agoI think it’s basically the attitude “customer support is expensive and annoying, and since we’re Google and can do whatever we want, let’s skip it.” This kind of made sense when they had a massive tech advantage such that their products also needed less support. Now they seem to have lost that edge and are just another competitor offering products that come with poor support.
- dingusdew 4y ago[dead]
- jollofricepeas 4y agoI’d like to draw parallels to the old cable titans with local monopolies who also had the same customer service tactics as well. 1. Offer a cheap (free) service 2. Gain significant market penetration 3. Provide little to no customer service 4. Raise prices 5. Let the product/services degrade until significant public outcry or regulator involvement
- jrootabega 4y agoCustomers? Them thinking of us as peasants, or even cattle, might better explain these attitudes.
- hedora 4y agoThe term of art is "Chattle", as in "Trespass on Chattle". e.g., start by reading section IIa of this: https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3169&context=sdlr https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=316... Essentially, Intel employees are 'chattle', and while communicating with them doesn't transfer ownership or control of them away from Intel, it does interfere with Intel's ongoing use of them.
- jrootabega 4y agoThe spirit is the same, but I don't think we're talking about the same thing. It's "chattel", and according to wikipedia, for whatever that's worth, it's "trespass to chattels". I didn't see any reference there about treating people in a customer relationship as the "chattel" referred to in this law.
- hedora 4y agoIt wasn’t originally meant to be applied to employees. That’s a modern interpretation. It seems inevitable that some court will extend the interpretation to customers too.
- prepend 4y agoI don’t think it’s reasonable. I think it’s poor engineering. Imagine if a hard drive had a limit on the number of files, not just the size. Would that be reasonable. Or imagine if someone designed a storage protocol and submitted it to IETF with such a limitation saying “it doesn’t affect the vast majority of users so we set this arbitrary limit to make our lives easier.” It would not make it through review.
- Kye 4y agoFile systems do have a limit on number of files, though as far as I know they're all quite a bit higher than anything in the millions.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoOf course, with a physical disk there are also things you can do to get around those limitations, like switch to a different filesystem or use multiple filesystems on one disk. Using the cloud leaves you exposed to the whims of the cloud provider. They select and switch technologies based on their needs instead of yours.
- Kye 4y agoIf you manage to hit five billion files (which seems to be the standard limit), you might be in the market for object storage rather than new frontiers in file systems.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> five billion files (which seems to be the standard limit), Article says 5 million? Still a big number, but smaller than 5 billion.
- Kye 4y agoWe're talking about file systems.
- criley2 4y agoFor the record, Google does run a full communications channel for cross-Google support for subscribers of Google One.
- djha-skin 4y agoGoogle could have (and many expected them to) eat Amazon's lunch for cloud compute back when it was new. However, Amazon actually had infrastructure around customer support while Google famously really doesn't. From what I gather Google cloud is technologically better, but no one wants to use a cloud from someone who doesn't do customer support as well.
- antiterra 4y agoI interviewed with Google Cloud a few years back and they straight up told me they were behind both AWS & Azure as a product and were lacking in user support. They said they were trying to build out an org to address it.
- tedivm 4y agoI've got a tale of two clouds. I complained about an issue with AWS on Twitter and two hours later was on a call with the EKS product manager who connected me with someone on their team who documented the issue, gave me a workaround, and then pushed out a fix to everyone a few days later. It was super impressive! I complained about a separate issue with GCP. The product manager found my tweet and told me it was my fault for using a service marked as "preview". He then told me I should have used a different service, which was also marked as "preview". They were rude and defensive and made no attempt to resolve my issue. We decided to just not use GCP for the project as a result. Neither of these are isolated stories. I have multiple examples of GCP staff just being super rude for no real reason, while AWS regularly goes above and beyond with customer service.
- acdha 4y agoThis matches my experience. GCP was like IBM a decade earlier: they assumed the name alone would close the deal and we didn’t feel like paying more for the privilege of doing their jobs for them.
- eitland 4y agoI've experienced both: One time two very competent guys shows up on site and let me reproduce the issue, agrees it is a serious bug and promises to take care of it. Next time I get connected with what seems to be two part time students or something who doesn't seem to have a clue about the product. Then in a third case some technical architect or something looks into my stack overflow question, verifies there is a known bug and it will be fixed in next monthly rollout, but I never saw a fix.
- kmbfjr 4y agoIt is not reasonable at all if you sell the service by N gigabytes per month. They materially changed the service without telling anyone. Google does this all the time, anyone who uses GCP, particularly BigQuery, knows all too well about stealth changes that break things.
- thebytefairy 4y agoWhat BigQuery changes have affected you? I haven't noticed any in years of regular use.
- victortroz 4y agoI believe it's related to the price changes they announced this week, it could double some use cases cost.
- colordrops 4y agoHow about just not using google? There are viable alternatives to almost everything they offer. I haven't been using them for anything for a year now.
- colordrops 4y agoI find that my most often downvoted comments here are those that shed negative light on Google. Curious.
- newZWhoDis 4y ago> Leadership at Google ought to recognize this It’s not a recognition problem, there’s no “aha” moment that will come from the right person just explaining it to them. They simply don’t care, and have no incentive to ever change.
- tlogan 4y agoThe common practice among other companies is this: - Give old users approaching or exceeding limit with an additional 10% or 20% buffer. - Ensure to notify all users about the change - Update relevant support documentation. Clear communication is crucial in addressing new storage limitation. For example, organizations might be archiving all their emails in a single Google Drive for legal discovery, AI training, or similar purposes. These companies may quickly reach the 5 million limit, but the situation can be resolved by dividing the content across multiple Google Drives or utilizing alternative storage solutions like Amazon S3 or Dropbox. No big deal. The crux of the matter lies in maintaining clear communication.
- wankle 4y ago> Having a limit of 5 million files is perfectly reasonable. Is it? On this desktop I have 1.5 million files, "df -i" says I've used 1.1 million inodes and I have 61 million inodes free. The 5 million file limit on Google Drive seems to be excessively low. Note to Google, consider re-imagining your PhD's and MBA's as food service personnel.
- messe 4y agoAgreed, it's absurdly low. My rootfs is ~1 million inodes, with ~61 million free too; I only reinstalled Gentoo a couple of months ago, so I'm only using 180GB / 1TB. EDIT: s/files/inodes
- Karellen 4y ago> On this desktop I have 1.5 million files, "df -i" says I've used 1.1 million inodes You have 400,000 files with 2 hard links? Or 100,000 files with 5 hard links each? How? Why?
- wankle 4y agoI'm not sure what you're asking? I'm happy to try and oblige, do you have a command I can run to answer your questions?
- dylan604 4y ago>Having a limit of 5 million files is perfectly reasonable For ordinary users, this would pretty much equate to an unlimited account. Much like ATT's old unlimited bandwidth accounts. It's not until power users start hitting these ceilings to realize unlimited doesn't mean what they think it means. I don't know if Googs every used that kind of phrasing or not, but you can see where some dev never thought that limit would be achievable so there's no reason to really mention it.
- pid-1 4y agoWeird they don't consider how that sort of bad behavior impacts their other business. I started a company in 2019 -> didn't choose G Suite, because I don't trust Google. Same for GCP.
- kjellsbells 4y agoI wonder if this message is getting through to Google, because the evidence suggests not. Any corp considering Google services has to seriously evaluate the risk that one day google will just decide to whack the service. Even in GCP, things that you might have thought would be solid for the long term, like IoT, can go away. Once you lose that trust, it's very hard to get it back. Azure and AWS I'm sure do their share of dumb things, but it really sticks to Google because everyone knows that they are infamous for killing products.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago> Leadership at Google ought to recognize this They're fully aware of how bad it is. They do not care. The Ad gravy train is still here, and they'll milk it until they can't anymore and then retire to their multiple homes (or go off and do it again to some other company). I don't know why people expect leadership to do anything about a shitty company. They have literally no incentive to change. They'll always be hired somewhere else. Business as usual.
- acomjean 4y agoEven my bog cheap hosting lists storage limits and, "inode" limits on its dashboard. We're doing fine on both but way worse on the number of files.