Tips for Decreasing Firebase Latency

[Brad Dwyer]

I'm writing a Firebase app that uses your phone as a game controller for your computer. Unfortunately lag is a bit of an issue. The problem isn't necessarily absolute lag (it's not great but tolerable when it's fast), it's inconsistent latency. One button press will be registered almost instantly and the next may take 5x longer making it feel like it's dropping data (even though it's not).

Anything I can do to improve this and/or smooth it out?

[Andrew Lee]

Hi Brad -

Mobile internet connections are spotty -- there's really nothing we can do about that. Firebase tries to help by always triggering local events *immediately*, without waiting for network latency. So you should never see latency while you wait for data to go to the server and back, but you'll see latency between devices if the network connection is bad.

There's really no reason Firebase should be slower than any other communication method here, so if you're seeing Firebase be slower than a raw socket or anything else, then that's a bit alarming. If that's the case can you provide a repro?

-Andrew

On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Brad Dwyer <bradle...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm writing a Firebase app that uses your phone as a game controller for your computer. Unfortunately lag is a bit of an issue. The problem isn't necessarily absolute lag (it's not great but tolerable when it's fast), it's inconsistent latency. One button press will be registered almost instantly and the next may take 5x longer making it feel like it's dropping data (even though it's not).

Anything I can do to improve this and/or smooth it out?

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Andrew Lee

Founder, Firebase

http://twitter.com/startupandrew

[Brad Dwyer]

Don't have anything to compare with (in terms of raw sockets). But it's not ungodly slow so I doubt there's anything wrong. Was hoping for some magic I guess haha

[Andrew Lee]

Fresh out of magic, unfortunately : )

-Andrew