How to check in depth why Waiting/Saving is hanging

Question

I have a sheet with 14*40000 cells that is giving me consistent hangs during some operations. I've been trimming it down and exporting just the one tab to a new sheet (works fine), and it sometimes hangs calculating formulas (Waiting...) in the top right), and then I can reproduce the problem below by simply duplicating the sheet.

I have also reproduced this with a new doc with one sheet of 20x45000 cells, all of the letter "x". See images of this.

Duplicating the tab gives me a persistent the Saving in the header, eventually it eventually just gives me:

"Saving your changes is taking longer than usual. Editing is temporarily disabled."

• no formulas
• no formatting
• no apps scripts
• no workspace addons relevant to sheets (disabled an Airtable add-on for good measure)
• disabled any browser extensions
• made sure values are pretty scalar
• • numbers/text
• • no sign of automatic link detection or whatever
• checked in Brave/Chrome/Firefox
• checked Google Docs service static (all greenticks)
• Drive sync not running
• Tested with another user in the Workspace
• No one else in the workbook
• Replicated this in another workspace account.

So I'm wondering what is my next step - a Google Workspace Helpdesk ticket? Since I replicated this in another Workspace account, this surely must be a general upstream issue.

Answer 1

Since the issue eventually resolved (for everyone I had testing for me) and it resolved at different times for different people, my conclusion is that this was a regional issue with Google services, or connectively to some google services, that eventually flushed through. Help desk were not entirely helpful, saying that we should try to use “high speed zero fluctuation network”.