For read-heavy applications that don’t involve components external to Apps Script accessing the cache and don’t exceed the CacheService limits, use CacheService. For write-heavy applications or for when some external parts require access to the same cache, use Spreadsheet App.
An interesting report from Ignacio Lopezosa Serrano on the relative performance of CacheService and SpreadsheetApp for reading/writing data with Google Apps Script. Some surprising results and something I think to be kept in mind is how these tests compare to ‘real world’ conditions. As also pointed out in the post there are some service limitations of CacheService to keep in mind particularly around storage size limits.
If you have ever worked with Google Apps Script (GAS), you may have found yourself in this situation. You want to move some files from some Google service to another, e.g., from Drive to a Google Cloud Storage Bucket. You get the file’s contents using GAS’s built-in service in the form of a Byte array. You pass this byte array to the URLFetchApp.fetch() function in the body.
All is going good and well, but then you notice. Why is it taking 30 seconds to upload a 10MB file? Am I doing something wrong? Is GAS not meant for this?
Don’t panic. I’ve been there, and I decided to take a closer look. Here’s what I found.
In this article Ignacio Lopezosa takes a deep dive into how to handle bytes in Google Apps Script, sharing his journey in finding a solution on how to share (large) files.
