How realtime is Firebase?

[Lior Bruder]

Hi All,

My company is about to build a 2D real time multiplayer game for iOS and Android.

We were wondering if we can rely on firebase for our game.

So my questions is: "How realtime is Firebase realtime database?" can the client get updated 10 times in a seconds? less? more? 

Any information of reference to this issue will be highly appreciated.

Thanks,

Lior 

[Stewart Miles]

~100ms latency but it depends.  If you're building a turn based card game, some feedback to the other player (you can imagine the style of game I'm talking about) you could use the RT DB.  Really you need to consider what state you want to persist and what is local to a game session.  For the state you want to persist (e.g destructible environments) store in the RT DB at a lower frequency and immediate - real-time - state relayed by a server e.g on Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine or whatever other provider.

Though of course, we're always adding new features so you never know what solutions we may be able to offer in future.

Cheers,

Stewart

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[Tom Larkworthy]

So RT DB is not good with write heavy workloads, I would try to stay below 300 writes per second, which means a RT DB could support 30 concurrent players. You will need to shard to go above that.

The underlying transport is websocket, which is over TCP and has a head of line blocking issue. So those are the major constraints you need to deal with. I tried seeing how well a twitch game would work with predictive lag compensation, you can try it out and see for yourself  https://construct2example.firebaseapp.com/pages/blog/latency_part1.html

Tom

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