I am using firebase database and my question is, for example how fast can I reach 1GB if i have 100 users each storing worth 10 document pages of microsoft word full of text everyday, for one month?
Word documents would be stored in Firebase Storage, not the realtime database. Realistically, the only way you will be billed anything for using the Firebase platform is if your app gets a significant of usage. I suspect that 99% of firebase apps do not generate any billing whatsoever. ...that's just a hunch.
If you do run into billing issues, that will/would be a good thing.
Although this question is too broad since it lacks various variables like the number of users, size of the files and how this data is presented in the app I will try to give my $0.02 on this in a very generic way which can also be interpreted as how not to end up with a huge bill while using firebase,
Even though Firebase provides a sufficient space to test out the app in production there is a lot of ways in which things can go bad real quick like,
1) since firebase automatically handles the sync this additional read/write call comes out of your quota apart from the call you trigger check-out how one app developers found this out the hard way
2) if you have bad DB schema/design that you have not addressed, then you end up making multiple calls to the server to fetch the data which again bloats up the number of calls you make read about this here
3) Not setting spending limits and alerts, this should be a mandatory step to avoid a lot of the above problems even though the docs clearly gives an indication on how to set this up
These are some of the cases that I have come across I hope this serves as a guideline to set up your app
Related
Unfortunately Firebase's Flame plan disappeared and I now have to deal with Blaze plan, which I'm not fan of because of it's "unlimited" budget (but my wallet isn't). Yesterday I was coding and by mistake made a loop that called 3 Cloud Functions, I spotted the loop fast enough to stop the carnage.
In only 15 seconds of execution, I've been able to trigger more than 10K requests, and without errors, that a pretty good performance of Firebase, but it's scary as well! How can I cap this to throttle requests coming from users? I'm pretty confident in my code, but as we all know if someone gets my Firebase config file, I'm done.
I'm a solo developer and it's my first app done on my spare time, I don't want to to become a mess because of triggering reads / writes / Cloud Functions. No one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, maybe I didn't spot a small bug in my code that'll reveal it's true potential only once in production. I'm not asking Firebase to handle my mistakes, but I'd like to be able to stop the CF and Firebase if I want to.
My only desire is to sleep confident, I don't want to wake up one morning with a 10.000$ bill. I've read that's it's possible to totally disable billing account on a project with CloudFunctions, but what will happen to my Firebase Storage bucket for example (for the storage superior to the Spark plan)? And it doesn't seem easy to do.
Firebase is a great product and I love how easy / fun it is to use, but now that budget locked plans as Flame are gone I feel really trapped now that my application is almost ready to go into production, and I don't think I'm the only one out there.
Ah you've stumbled onto the 'rate-limiting' conundrum. Not to worry, I've spent many nights worrying about this myself.
In order to get a bit more control over your application, you're going to have to link your project to google cloud platform. Then navigate to IAM & Admin>Quotas (once you've selected your firebase project).
Now you might be overwhelmed initially, and confused as to why there are so many Cloud functions API limiters. These quotas should allow you to rate limit your cloud functions API (similar to what twitter does) in a number of ways, including but not limited to:
Read Requests per day
Read requests per 100 seconds
Function invocations per 100 seconds
Function invocations per day
etc
The API that will be listed are the ones you've enabled, so you can set limits for cloud storage as well.
By default, the max number of invocations per second is set to the maximum of 5000 invocations per day on the spark plan. but according to the docs, the absolute maximum is 100,000,000/100 seconds!
Also worth having a look at is the pricing docs, which have a nice example of a typical monthly use case for a successful app. To grossly oversimplify, a single invocation costs $0.0000004, hence 10,000,000 invocations will cost you a whopping $3.20. However don't let that very low cost fool you, if you write some terrible code and it has exponential complexity (like reading every document in a firestore collection every invocation), you could get slapped with an exponential cost. So make sure you set those quotas :)
Remember, server admin is as much a part of the application as the code itself. If your app goes to production, be prepared to spend some time each day going through the Google cloud dashboard and checking limits, analyzing trends, etc. This way you can kind of step up the amount of invocations you can allow per day and sleep well knowing that if you shoot yourself in the foot, you won't bleed too much.
Best of luck with it
Despicable B.
I know that I could implement a counter in my application but using an api would still be a cleaner solution - if one exists?
Basically, Firestore has Spark free tier limits (think 50,000 reads/day) that I don't want to exceed. So whenever my app was going to do firestore reads, I would like a way to simply ask firestore whether I'm over a certain number.
I'm also reading that Google intentionally got rid of Firebase spending limits.. which seems really sketchy... Impossible to set the Cloud Firebase daily spending limit
There is no such API as part of Firebase. The ways to monitor usage are documented here, but none of them is an API.
You might be able to get some data through the Cloud Monitoring API. But this API isn't made for client-side access though, so you'll have to wrap it yourself.
A final alternative would be to look at a service like https://firerun.io/ who automate a lot of this.
Context: I am total Google Cloud begginer and I have just convinced my company headers to use Firestore Realtime Database for pushing transaction status to our mobile application. We have around 4 millions users that will use significantly our application for small money transfers. Now-a-days we use the concept of polling from Android/IOS to our Microservice endpoints and it will replaced by Firebase SDK imported to our Mobile app which will listen/observe to our Firestore Collection following few Firestore Rules. Since all money transfer will be confirmed/denied in short time (from few seconds to 1 or 2 minutes) the idea of replacing polling by a real reactive approach straigh from Firestore sounded and is already ongoing coding.
The issue: Firstly I don't what to compare solutions. It is just my reality: the prodution support operators must look after our internal Dashboard. Isn't allowed to them look at Google Dashboard Console (please accept this for this question). I need get on demand metrics of our FIrestore. It is nothing to do with Google pricing. It is just our demand: they want to see metrics like:
how many users listening at the same time now
how many users took some exception during connection
is there any user holding connection for more than X minute
when was the connection pick this morning
any exception of any type surrounding our Firestore database
I read Code Samples carefully follow the sample step-by-step trying to figure out some idea if there is some API providing the answers I am looking for.
So, my straight question is: is there such type of Google API providing metrics about my Firestore Database? Maybe following the same idea we found in Performance Monitor which works on Mobile side also some similar aproach on Firestore side.
*** Edited
Future readers may find worth read also about a way to get Firestore metrics info striagh from curl/postman
A couple of things: You mentioned both Firestore and Realtime Database; just wanted to make sure that you are aware that those are two different databases offered under the Firebase umbrella.
how many users listening at the same time now
is there any user holding connection for more than X minute
Yes, there's a dashboard: https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317517?hl=en. Including lots of options, like users active in the last 30 mins.
how many users took some exception during connection
any exception of any type surrounding our Firestore database
Yes, you can track errors and other logging via Stack Driver logging. These can give you reports on your cloud functions.
https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/monitoring
Where can I find Stackdriver in Firebase console?
when was the connection pick this morning
For this one, I'm not sure if you mean A. when did somebody log on in the morning, or B. what was the time that there was the peak \ most usage. If B see 1. If A,
Real-time database has the concept of presence, which lets you know if a user is currently logged in or not. See examples here from the official documentation:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/presence
and this post
How to make user presence mechanism using Firebase?
Also applies to your
is there any user holding connection for more than X minute
..............
Edit in response to comments: I believe you are experiencing the XY problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem where you are focused on a particular solution, even though your problem has other solutions. User metrics, database events, and errors are all accessible through both dashboards and cloud functions. You can cURL cloud functions if you wish, or set up cron functions to auto report, or set up database trigger functions to log errors. So, while the exact way you want this to work may not exist, you just need to connect existing tools to get the result you want.
I am developing an Android app which basically does this: On the landing(home) page it shows a couple of words. These words need to be updated on daily basis. Secondly, there is an 'experiences' tab in which a list of user experiences (around 500) shows up with their profile pic, description,etc.
This basic app is expected to get around 1 million users daily who will open the app daily at least once to see those couple of words. Many may occasionally open up the experiences section.
Thirdly, the app needs to have a push notification feature.
I am planning to purchase a managed wordpress hosting, set up a website, and add a post each day with those couple of words, use the JSON-API to extract those words and display them on app's home page. Similarly for the experiences, I will add each as a wordpress post and extract them from the Wordpress database. The reason I am choosing wordpress is that it has ready made interfaces for data entry which will save my time and effort.
But I am stuck on this: will the wordpress DB be able to handle such large amount of queries ? With such a large userbase and spiky traffic, I suspect I might cross the max. concurrent connections limit.
What's the best strategy in my case ? Should I use WP, or use firebase or any other service ? I need to make sure the scheme is cost effective also.
My app is basically very similar to this one:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ekaum.ekaum
For push notifications, I am planning to use third party services.
Kindly suggest the best strategy I should go with for designing the back end of this app.
Thanks to everyone out there in advance who are willing to help me in this.
I have never used Wordpress, so I don't know if or how it could handle that load.
You can still use WP for data entry, and write a scheduled function that would use WP's JSON API to copy that data into Firebase.
RTDB-vs-Firestore scalability states that RTDB can handle 200 thousand concurrent connections and Firestore 1 million concurrent connections.
However, if I get it right, your app doesn't need connections to be active (i.e. receive real-time updates). You can get your data once, then close the connection.
For RTDB, Enabling Offline Capabilities on Android states that
On Android, Firebase automatically manages connection state to reduce bandwidth and battery usage. When a client has no active listeners, no pending write or onDisconnect operations, and is not explicitly disconnected by the goOffline method, Firebase closes the connection after 60 seconds of inactivity.
So the connection should close by itself after 1 minute, if you remove your listeners, or you can force close it earlier using goOffline.
For Firestore, I don't know if it happens automatically, but you can do it manually.
In Firebase Pricing you can see that 100K Firestore document reads is $0.06. 1M reads (for the two words) should cost $0.6 plus some network traffic. In RTDB, the cost has to do with data bulk, so it requires some calculations, but it shouldn't be much. I am not familiar with the pricing small details, so you should do some more research.
In the app you mentioned, the experiences don't seem to change very often. You might want to try to build your own caching manually, and add the required versioning info in the daily data.
Edit:
It would possibly be more efficient and less costly if you used Firebase Hosting, instead of RTDB/Firestore directly. See Serve dynamic content and host microservices with Cloud Functions and Manage cache behavior.
In short, you create a HTTP function that reads your database and returns the data you need. You configure hosting to call that function, and configure the cache such that subsequent requests are served the cached result via hosting (without extra function invocations).
I have a Firebase (Firestore) project on which, to my surprise, I just reached the free limit of 50k daily reads only while testing simple regular pages of my app.
I tried to find a way to log how much calls are done for each of my app's pages, or by function... I didn't find how to.
Is there a simple way to get this data clarified? I absolutely need to find what calls are causing this before sending anything to production.
There is no breakdown within the Cloud Firestore console or Stack Driver on the source of read operations. If you need something like that, the best I can think of is to log additional information from your clients.