Is Firebase's latency low enough to be used for realtime MMOG instead of socket?

Question

I wonder if Firebase's performance (latency, throughput) is good enough to be used real-time MMO games online.

Could someone with enough knowledge share their opinions on this?

Can Firebase be used instead of socket for real time games?

Homemaking

I highly doubt this will function properly for an MMO simply because HTTP is not fast enough (it also uses TCP which can lead to terrible latency). – Gradus

Also see #37926879 where I answered a similar question an hour ago. – Abolish

We have a number of people using Ably, our realtime data delivery platform for MMO and they have not reported any issues. I am not sure I agree that TCP is going to lead to terrible latency, we typically see latencies ranging from 10ms up to around 200ms in some rather remote places. – Witmer

A potential issue is that you may want to throw away some data after distributing it to the players. If so, you'd need to handle this yourself, because the Firebase database of course keeps the data. Otherwise you'd get a lot of data in the database. That doesn't need to be a problem, but if it provides no value to keep all the data for later it might be something to avoid to keep the potential costs down. – Bobsledding

@MatthewO'Riordan hi matthew re peak connections: if we have 30K uniques in a month, but at most 50 are ever connected at the same time, we only pay for 50 peak connections? thanks! – Tuesday

@MuliYulzary TCP can lead to terrible latency? – Lint

@JorgeFuentesGonzález check out this discussion its pretty thorough: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272610 – Gradus

Oh well, yeah. The problem is that browsers don't support UDP. Talking about WebSockets I thought about browsers. – Lint

Answer 1

Short answer is NO: with firebase you'll get client synchronised after a couple of 100 of milliseconds. You may also find consuming to much network traffic with would make firebase prohibitively expensive.

Greg

Ok the expensive count but 200ms latency was OK when playing Warcraft 3 – Micro