Recent issues

[Jonathan Kim]

There have been a serious number of issues lately. Can you shed some light on why this is happening? Pre-Google, Firebase was so stable and awesome, and now I've started to worry about its future.

[James Tamplin]

Hi Jonathan -

Firebase founder here.

Our uptime hasn't been where we would like. I'm sorry that it hasn't been great and that it's at a point where you're concerned about the future of Firebase.

The reasons for this are 1) increased load from usage growth and 2) downtime as we brought new capacity online. Specifically, we had disruptions last Thursday and Friday that affected some of our apps. During a migration to a new, higher performance persistence layer, we ran into an obscure bug. It took several hours to troubleshoot and mitigate. The upshot is better reliability and a big performance increase. The downside is that there was downtime. When you've bet your application on Firebase, I know is extremely painful.

Google is investing heavily in Firebase and we're continually working on leveraging Google's infrastructure to provide better service. Expect some great things in the months ahead.

You can reach out to me personally at ja...@firebase.com with other questions anytime.

Best,

James

On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 8:37 AM, Jonathan Kim <jona...@appcues.com> wrote:

There have been a serious number of issues lately. Can you shed some light on why this is happening? Pre-Google, Firebase was so stable and awesome, and now I've started to worry about its future.

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[Jonathan Kim]

Hi James,

Thanks for the honest reply. We and other teams I've referred have definitely bet our applications on Firebase and have been anxiously looking for improvements since the acquisition last October. It's not uncommon for companies like Google to suffocate teams like yours with politics and administrivia, but I'm rooting for you to come out on top. It's reassuring to know that you and other OG Firebase folks like Kato are still onboard.

[James Tamplin]

No problem Jonathan. Every Firebaser who joined is still at Google and our team has grown quite a bit too.

[Doug Thompson]

Thanks for the open response.

I took heart in the high profile Firebase had at Google I/O...this shows serious commitment in my mind, and that this isn't a product that's peripheral. It's great to see the importance Google placed on Firebase.

I'm also skeptical of "one size fits all" about acquisitions. If it was an aquihire, maybe, but we've also seen astonishing stories of how a technology could do much more once they had access to Google infrastructure. (Hey Deep Mind!)

Hopefully this remains true of Firebase - which will be further validated when the long-awaited triggers descend from the heavens in a cloud of pixie dust. ;)

[Ab Scond]

Thanks for the informative reply.

You talked about uptime, but what about response time?

Looking at status.firebase.com, I see that things like Firebase Password Auth is averaging 832ms over the last month.  Firebase Oauth is average 643ms, and the Firebase Website Login is 1,160ms!

Additionally, looking at the different shards, most of them have HTTP response time in the 400ms to 500ms range.

Do you consider these acceptable, and if not, what are you targeting for acceptable response times?

[Jacob Wenger]

Hey there,

I'll take this one. I have a few thoughts on our response times:

• For password auth, we intentionally use a large work factor to prevent a user from easily brute forcing passwords. That itself adds time to the request and is not something that will change. We will not trade security for response times.
• For OAuth login, most of the time is spent entering credentials for and round-tripping to Facebook, Google, etc. so our response times are going to be inconsequential given the rest of the flow. And 643 ms is fast for what is going here!
• For all auth methods, remember that your users will most likely at most log in once a day. A one second request once a day is not really going to hurt anything. Short response times for the realtime database are much more important.
• The firebase.com website login response time is higher than we'd like and I do see that it has regressed in the past month by about 350ms (see the graph below). Similar to what I noted above, our users log in about once a month, so a response time of 1200 ms is not going to be major pain point for anyone. That being said, I will see if I can track down the change that caused this regression.

• I would not try to glean any average response times from the namespace servers. Essentially that check is doing a REST request to a Firebase database we own and waiting for the response to return. This means the HTTPS connection will need to be established, there will be an SSL handshaking that occurs, and we need to get the uncached data. If you are using our actual clients, they keep open a persistent websocket which doesn't requiring any of those things I mentioned upon successive requests. Our clients will also use cached data whenever possible. I bet if you test your response times yourself, you will see they are in the low hundreds of milliseconds.

Now, so that it doesn't look like I'm just making excuses, here is the graph of anonymous auth response times in the last month:

​

Response times fell from ~950 ms to ~400 ms on average due to a change we made a couple weeks back. I can't promise similar drops for the other authentication methods, but this just shows you that we aren't sitting still. We will try to get these numbers down across the board.

Jacob

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