Might FCM cause a DDOS?

[Ransom Christofferson]

When I send an FCM message to thousands of devices (via the Composer in the console) and include an image in the message, will this cause thousands of simultaneous requests to the image URL?

Or does Firebase stagger the pushing of notifications over a period of time?

Or does Firebase include the binary image data in the push notification (which would cause no hits on the image URL other than Firebase servers fetching the image)?

thanks for any insight you might have.

[Arthur Thompson]

Hi,

The message that is sent to devices does not include any binary data. FCM messages are limited to 4000 bytes not enough to include binary data like images.

If a message includes an image URL that image will be fetched by the client at the time the notification is generated. Each client will make its own request for the image so data transfer costs for the image should be taken into consideration.

Hope this clarifies things,

Arthur.

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[Ransom Christofferson]

Thanks. In the case where there is a large number of users to send a push message to, do you know if Firebase servers send messages as fast as they can to all targeted users, or do they send in batches over a longer period of time?

[Arthur Thompson]

FCM will try to deliver the message to the target audience as soon as possible.

Keep a couple things in mind though:

1. Throughput tops out at around 600K messages per minute, so consider that in your expectations for how fast messages can be delivered.

2. Messages can only be delivered to devices that are online. By default FCM will hold on to messages for devices that are not online and try to deliver them when the device comes back online. You can adjust this behavior with the TTL property.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/firebase-talk/f0417e31-8eac-4927-8b8d-01ce9a6a7922n%40googlegroups.com.