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Comment by samspenc | Hacker News Reader

Currently, Google Drive is telling me: "Wow, this file is really popular! It might be unavailable until the crowd clears. Try again." (Page title: "Too Many Requests")

I didn't even know Google Drive had a throttling mode.

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> I didn't even know Google Drive had a throttling mode.

Google Docs (docs, spreadsheets, and presentations) is designed for collaborative editing. It scales really well to lots of docs; it scales to a decent number of people collaborating on a single doc.

If many people want to simply view a single document, use the "publish" menu item. It's more restrictive (iirc, it doesn't show chat, comment threads, document history, or live updates) but AFAIK has no limit on how many people can view at once.

I didn't even know Google Drive had a throttling mode.

Right. That seems like something from the era of 1990s hosting services with very limited capacity.

To be fair, Google Docs' core offering is live collaborative editing, not 'being a CDN'. Sure, there are ways they can support each at different times if they really wanted to, but it seems perfectly reasonable for them to say that when it gets to an N that they'd have to put significant engineering effort into supporting, that that's not what it was designed for, and that if someone wants CDN behaviour do that they can always export the document and put it on an actual CDN

wow so a platform with a robust sharing capability is not designed for certain 'types' of sharing. So the user has to be aware the internal implementation of each google cloud service and use them accordingly. I say this scenario is acceptable for a startup offering. Not so for one of the most concentrated comp sci engineering org.

Additionally, this is Google Slides. So sharing is inherent in the name of the product

The user data is tied to the location of the data center. the files may not be replicated past the most proximal location for his use. Regular performance/networky issues then come into play.

They should have used a Lambda-function for scaling. It's only code in a zip-container.

Scaling they code they can easily. The issue is with collaborative editing and keeping everybody in sync - which is the job of Google docs.

Google should have used Amazon's cloud? Really? They have one of their own.

The suggestion was a jab at another HN hype story, from yesterday.

TIL, Google Drive built on the Geocities platform.

Our firewall blocks it for some reason.

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