Anatomy of a workspace sync round-trip
People sometimes think of cloud sync as "the change goes to the server and the server tells everyone else". The reality is a lot more layered, and understanding those layers helps to reason about the workspace's behaviour under load, on flaky connections, and during conflicting edits. Here is what happens between the moment you press a key in a note and the moment that letter appears on another browser signed in to the same workspace.
Step 1 — Local intent
The key press produces a local intent object inside the browser. The intent object describes a semantic operation — "insert the character 'r' at paragraph 7, position 12" — not the resulting text. This lets us reconcile concurrent edits without wrecking each other's paragraphs.
Step 2 — Local commit
The intent is applied to the local DOM immediately (that is why typing feels instant) and appended to a local intent log. The log is flushed to the sync backbone every 60 milliseconds, or whenever it accumulates more than 24 KB, whichever comes first.
Step 3 — Signed request to the region
The flush sends an HTTPS request to the workspace's home region — Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam or Warsaw. The request carries the session cookie, the intent log and a monotonic per-workspace sequence number. On the priority sync rail, the round-trip target is 200 milliseconds; on the Free-plan shared rail it is 400 milliseconds.
Step 4 — Serialize at the region
The region orders concurrent intents deterministically by (workspace-scoped Lamport timestamp, tie-broken by session UUID). The reconciler applies each intent to the authoritative workspace state, computes the after-state hash, and writes both the intent and the hash to the durable log.
Step 5 — Fan-out
The reconciled intent is fanned out to every other browser holding a live sync socket for the same workspace. The socket delivers the intent, not the resulting text — the receiving browser applies the intent to its own local DOM and re-computes the hash to verify it matches. A mismatch triggers a full-state resync, which is rare (single-digit occurrences per million intents).
Step 6 — Continuous replication
In parallel with fan-out, the reconciled intent is replicated to two additional availability zones within the home region. This is the "continuous backup" advertised on the pricing page — every intent is in three zones within a hundred milliseconds of being reconciled.
Step 7 — Snapshot
Every hour, a snapshot of the workspace state is taken and retained for 30 days. Business-plan workspaces also receive a cross-region snapshot each night with 90-day retention.
What this means for you
Practically, three things: sync feels instant even at trans-Atlantic latency because the local DOM is updated before the round-trip completes; simultaneous edits by two seats on the same paragraph do not clobber each other because the reconciler orders them deterministically; and a workspace can never disappear because of a hardware failure in a single zone.