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I have had so many issues with Firebase, but the one that really pisses me off the most is that they used to advertise things like "scale worldwide to millions
by superfrank 9y ago
I have had so many issues with Firebase, but the one that really pisses me off the most is that they used to advertise things like "scale worldwide to millions of users" and "Unlimited Connections" but then cap you at 100k concurrent users (10k initially and will gradually bump you up to 100k). When we got in contact with them about this they were nice enough to explain that we could create another database and shard our data manually.
Fuck you Firebase, what a load of bull shit. Implying your database can scale infinitely because we can manually shard our data is like calling McDonalds an all you can eat restaurant because I can keep buying more chicken nuggets.
I've yet to meet anyone who has used Firebase on a large scale project and been happy with it. Firebase is a toy at best, IMO.
I honestly feel a bit bad for the development team at Firebase, they actually built something really cool that has a lot of potential. The problem I have is that someone took this cool project and basically lied to the public about its capabilities.
- srcreigh 9y agoWow, didn't know that. :/ Guess it is really only useful for prototypes.
- cakedoggie 9y ago> at 100k concurrent users That is a huge number of concurrent users though.
- grahamperich 9y agoThe risk of building on a platform that you know has that hard cap isn't worth it for many ventures though
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- superfrank 9y agoDepends on your perspective, but it doesn't matter as it's not the unlimited they advertised. Our app has multiple millions of users and we wanted to add a small feature which we were going to use Firebase to back. We ended up having to go back to the drawing board when we started a gradual roll out and hit that limit pretty quickly.
- teen 9y agosame thing bit me. also the onDisconnect events are not guaranteed to fire, so you get orphaned stale data everywhere, and need to run manual clean up scripts.
- skrebbel 9y ago> The problem I have is that someone took this cool project and basically lied to the public about its capabilities. Oh come on, it was a startup. The same people who made the tool told the lies (if that's what they were). Now under Google, this is still the case - the original founders now lead the Firebase department if I'm not mistaken. I'm pretty sure they have influence over the marketing messages.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> Oh come on, it was a startup. And then people are surprised when I advise them to avoid startup products. It's the classic tragedy of the commons; lying your way into an acquihire is a win for the successful founders, and a loss for the everyone else in the ecosystem, as more and more people grow sick of being played that way.
- mluggy 9y agofunny how you're right. i just got an api shutdown notice from stormpath (yet another product that supposed to save us developers): https://stormpath.com/ https://stormpath.com/
- CaveTech 9y agoWhen was that announced? You basically have 2 weeks to implement user management functionality? An acquisition so hot they basically say fuck you to all customers. Amazing.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThe announcement post[0] seems to be from March, which would give one about 4.5 months to migrate. -- [0] - https://stormpath.com/blog/stormpaths-new-path https://stormpath.com/blog/stormpaths-new-path
- skrebbel 9y agoYou misinterpreted my comment on purpose. I didn't say "it was a startup, so it's ok" I said "it was a startup, so the same people who built the service did the marketing". Also, Google's Firebase acquisition was many things, but not an acquihire.
- asadlionpk 9y agoThat's not the only limit btw. If any node (say "/users/") crosses 'some' number of subnodes ("/users/a", "users/b") then you cannot do any queries on the node itself. Like I cannot get even get the IDs of the subnodes ("a","b",...). I also got similar advice to shard my users or something. So right now, we have crossed that limit and are unable to know how many users are on our system. Their server just fails and takes down the DB for 10 or so mins if I do that query. Firebase is good for MVPs and prototypes but not at all scalable.
- saganus 9y agoWow. Running a query takes down the db? That sounds like a major problem. How can that happen? Maybe returning incorrect or incomplete results due to sharding... But taking the db down? That's very... Unexpected.
- asadlionpk 9y agoNope. A clear server crash with "Internal Server Error" and the DB being totally unavailable for 10-15 mins. Apparently it's 'normal'.
- calpaterson 9y agoNever used firebase but for what it's worth you can take down most databases with a bad enough query.
- asadlionpk 9y agoYou are right. But we usually have multiple ways to query our data in a DB. Not many ways to do that with the limited Firebase API.
- briffle 9y agoIn the RDBMS world, you can take down pretty much any database by giving someone in accounting a copy of Crystal Reports :)
- stemuk 9y agoIt is definitely true that pagination could be much easier. The way it currently works however seems fine to me: You query a node with say the rate limit of the first 30 children. Then you store the key of the last result, and use it as the starting point for the next limited query. This way you can easily query a node with 1000+ children without overloading the client.
- needlessly 9y agoCalm down
- amelius 9y agoI'm curious, what DB tool will you now consider using instead?
- HeshamA 9y agoSame here. I've started a prototype using firebase, however, I'm concerned about issues like this and the fact that sometime in the future I get a shutdown notice and I will have to migrate. I can roll my own using Rails but I'm trying to avoid that.
- mluggy 9y agogood old mysql. it is the cockroach of software.