CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firebasegoogle-cloud-platformgoogle-cloud-firestorelatency
Ben
Ben

Reputation: 1839

Lowering Cloud Firestore API Latency

I developed an Android application where I use Firebase as my main service for storing data, authenticating users, storage, and more.

I recently went deeper into the service and wanted to see the API usage in my Google Cloud Platform.

In order to do so, I navigated to https://console.cloud.google.com/ to see what it has to show inside APIs and Services:

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And by checking what might cause it I got:

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Can someone please explain what is the meaning of "Latency" and what could be the reason that specifically this service has so much higher Latency value compared to the other API's?

Does this value have any impact on my application such as slowing the response or something else? If yes, are there any guidelines to lower this value?

Thank you

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1489

Answers (2)

pjacobsson
pjacobsson

Reputation: 1

Listen and Write are long lived streams. In this case a 8 minute latency should be interpreted as a connection that was open for 8 minutes. Individual queries or write operations on those streams will be faster (milliseconds).

Upvotes: 0

LeadDreamer
LeadDreamer

Reputation: 3499

Latency is the "delay" until an operation starts. Cloud Functions, in particular, have to actually load and start a container (if they have paused), or at least load from memory (it depends on how often the function is called).

Can this affect your client? Holy heck, yes. but what you can do about it is a significant study in and of itself. For Cloud Functions, the biggest latency comes from starting the "container" (assuming cold-start, which your low Request count suggests) - it will have to load and initialize modules before calling your code. Same issue applies here as for browser code: tight code, minimal module loads, etc.

Some latency is to be expected from Cloud Functions (I'm pretty sure a couple hundred ms is typical). Design your client UX accordingly. Cloud Functions real power isn't instantaneous response; rather it's the compute power available IN PARALLEL with browser operations, and the ability to spin up multiple instances to respond to multiple browser sessions. Use it accordingly.

Upvotes: 1

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