"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.
> The reasonable case for multi-person editing of a document is several people at the max editing the document concurrently.
On the other hand, I suppose it would be good UI design to not show that warning to everybody who only have read-only access to the document,
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.