Interesting: when I visit this doc (on Google Docs), there's a line at the top of the page that says:
"Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears. [Try again] [Dismiss]"
This strikes me as a strange choice by the Google Docs team; rather than fixing the problem, they just tell you it exists. I mean, this is Google; don't they have lots of bandwidth and server capacity? Why can't they handle traffic spikes? Can anyone here shed some light on this?
The reasonable case for multi-person editing of a document is several people at the max editing the document concurrently.
Having thousands of people doing that is not a real-life scenario.
It's better to protect yourself from extremes like that by disabling editing functionality in that case than try to engineer a system that actually allows thousands of people editing a document concurrently (because it would be very expensive in engineering time and especially testing time).
There's literally no business case to be made for supporting thousands of concurrent edits - no one actually needs that functionality.
I don't think it's a matter of bandwidth. The document is being served up just fine; the only feature that seems to have been disabled is real-time commenting.
Google Docs, like most of their applications, is built on a highly available, globally-distributed database. (There's evidence that it was using Megastore as of a couple years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's now been migrated to Spanner.) That lets them scale to effectively infinite numbers of users, but it doesn't solve the problem of handling thousands of concurrent readers and writers all contending for the same individual rows in a multi-TB table, from multiple datacenters around the world.
This is pretty normal behaviour in large scale software. We add 'circuit breakers' (usually time, memory and rate based) that prevent denial of service attacks and stop exposed algorithms breaking sensible time limits per request. The last thing you want is one customer causing quality of service problems for another.
Probably they have reserved bandwidth for paid Google Apps accounts, and although Google is a computing giant, it's bandwidth is not unlimited. And about fixing it, I don't think this is a bug, it's a feature.
Just my opinion.
"Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears. [Try again] [Dismiss]"
This strikes me as a strange choice by the Google Docs team; rather than fixing the problem, they just tell you it exists. I mean, this is Google; don't they have lots of bandwidth and server capacity? Why can't they handle traffic spikes? Can anyone here shed some light on this?