Performance of real-time collaborative editors at large scale: User perspective

Abstract

International audienceReal-time collaborative editing allows multiple users to edit a shared document at the same time. It received a lot of attention from both industry and academia and gained in popularity due to the wide availability of free services such as Google Docs. While these collaborative editing systems were initially used in scenarios involving only a small set of users such as for writing a research article, nowadays we notice a change in the scale from several users to communities of users. Group note taking during lectures or conferences is an emerging practice. An important measure of performance of real-time collaborative editing systems is delay. Delays exist between the execution of one user modification and the visibility of this modification to the other users. They can be caused by network physical communication media, complexity of consistency maintenance algorithms and system architecture. Some user studies have shown that delay affects group performance in collaborative editing. In this paper, we measure delays in popular real-time collaborative editing systems such as Google Docs and Etherpad and we study whether these systems could cope with large scale settings from a user perspective. Our results show that these systems are not yet ready for large-scale collaborative activities as either they reject new users connection or a high delay appears when facing an increasing number of users or their typing speeds in the same shared document

formic: Building Collaborative Applications with Operational Transformation

“…3 we show the comparison between formic and ShareDB in a JSON editing scenario. We see that ShareDB performs slightly (a) Google Docs from [6] q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q better. In contrast to the first experiment, the delay of both systems remains relatively low and does not exceed 10 seconds.…”

“…We evaluated the performance of our library by reusing the experiment of Dang and Ignat [6], which was initially used to explore the performance of Google Docs [14] at large scale. In their experiment, real users have been simulated with Selenium, a widely accepted web-based testing tool.…”

“…Hence, no functionality of a rich text editor is utilized in this experiment. Therefore we decided to compare the performance measurement of Google Docs in [6] to the performance of the transformation of list operations in formic. We present the results in Fig.…”

“…Prominent example applications are Google's document editing suite Google Docs and the free competitor Etherpad. In recent work, Dang and Ignat showed, that the performance of both systems with a larger number of collaborators is limited [6]. Hence, our library must be able to compete with such systems, which we evaluate in section 4.…”

Collaborative Editing over Opportunistic Networks: State of the Art and Challenges

“…RCE can be used for documentation and communication in many tasks including design and engineering [43]. RCE have two advantages [44]:…”