CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firebasegoogle-cloud-functions
Wecherowski
Wecherowski

Reputation: 958

Firebase Cloud Functions Response Time

so up until mid 2018 there have been complaints about performance issues with Firebase Cloud Functions and Google CFs (which are the same under the hood I believe). Like these ones:

https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-node/issues/2374

https://github.com/firebase/firebase-functions/issues/161

I remember seeing that a simple Hello World example had a response time of 500ms - 800ms. EDIT: I know about cold starts, but as described in the GitHub issues cold starts were not the main problem. A Firebase Cloud Functions would randomly take up to 10s to respond which looked like a problem within Firebase.

I am currently considering building a project with Firebase and would like to build a REST API with Firebase cloud functions - but bad performance would be a deal breaker.

What's the current status? Do these problems still occur?
None of these GitHub issues were properly answered by Google, but also no more users have complained ever since …

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1525

Answers (2)

Soni Sol
Soni Sol

Reputation: 2612

Cloud Functions for Firebase are Google cloud Functions with a wrapper to allow them to integrate better with other Firebase products. Therefor it is expected a small loss of performance.

The important part to decide which one to use is more to what are you integrating the most. If your project is running in Firebase, uses firebase authentication etc then Cloud Functions for Firebase is the best choice.

On the other hand if you are using Google Cloud Platform Products then Google Cloud Funtions is the best choice.

Upvotes: 0

Doug Stevenson
Doug Stevenson

Reputation: 317362

Cold start times are a fact of life for serverless backends such as Cloud Functions. It's due to the way server instances are automatically scaled up and down to handle load in a cost-effective way. You can always expect that the first request to a new server instance will take some amount of time longer than the subsequent requests that get directed to that same server instance. That amount of time will be variable depending on a number of factors, including the type of trigger, and what all needs to happen with the first request.

If you want to learn more about Cloud Functions scale, what you can expect as a result, and what you can do to mitigate cold starts, watch my video series on the matter.

Upvotes: 2

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