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someone already did it, and to himself :D

http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-...

Interesting read. Also, good on Amazon for the P.S at the end: "Amazon was nice enough to refund the bandwidth charges [...] as they considered this activity accidental and not intentional."

In my experience all HTTP requests made from Google Docs functions and scripts are cached for at least a few minutes. There are workarounds to that but I would guess they do throttling at an IP and domain level as well (being that they know a thing or two about crawling the web).

The script

http://ctrlq.org/code/19319-website-monitor-script

iterates through the URLs in the spreadsheet and for each invokes

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetc...

which can accept parameters for a URL.

If those GET requests initiate intensive processes, then there could be a problem.