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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

"A Google support page states that “up to 100 people with view, edit, or comment permissions can work on a Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides file at the same time” and has a section devoted to troubleshooting files that become unresponsive after being shared with many people, recognizing the common pitfall."

That's a big number, but it's not as big as I'd expect from something from Google. I'd assume the average number of people working on any Sheet is 1 or 2, but I'm surprised that haven't been able to scale it up to 1000 or more by now.

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Also in the piece, "Jonathan Rochelle, the lead product manager for Google’s suite of collaborative tools from 2005 to 2013, said that he and his team found that having more than 25 to 50 editors on a single document made it hard for people to collaborate effectively."

The technical limitation is 2-4 times what the former product manager believed was a human limitation already. Scaling beyond that doesn't seem like a priority.

"View" was in that list though; is there a way to let more than 100 people view a sheet?

Yes, published mode.

Allowing a very large number of people to edit a document at the same time isn't trivial in terms of the state management and network load. Everyones edits have to be sync'd and sent to everyone else. Higher numbers than 100 are certainly achievable but perhaps there are limitations in their infrastructure for processing power available to a given sheet.

I believe that it's more that enabling that scaling would likely come with tradeoffs that would have negative impacts on the more common usecases.

This jumps out to me as the same thing as database contention except you have to distribute changes to every consumer. If everybody is only allowed to append I'm sure it scales to infinity like an event store. Handling updates just gets messy.

I would think the document would quickly become unmanageable if more than a few dozen are editing it at the same time. Even if it's possible technically, we start to enter social problems.

Sheets and Docs aren't really scaling apps. Docs scales globally by adding more docs, not by adding editors to a single document.

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