[other Firebase founder] It was painful to read the article[1] this morning, especially since I was one of the people responsible for dropping the ball on getting Home Automation the credit to cover the overage a few weeks ago. We're working with the founder to make sure he's in a better spot. If you have similarly serious issues, my email is: [email protected]
To address a couple of points that have been raised:
1. We're aware that as we've integrated with Google our support response time & quality has decreased. I'm working with our team to do better.
2. We know better querying and web offline are needed for the Realtime Database, stay tuned.
Finally, I hope you enjoy all the new features that launched today! (https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-from-fireb...) Leave a comment if you have thoughts/comments.
Do you happen to have any idea what actually happened internally with this? I ask this coming from the standpoint of "ouch, another example of ignored paying customers". Obviously this is a difficult question to answer generally, but extra detail about what happened has the potential to instantly pull this specific instance out of the generic "Google support is insufficiently human" bucket, which might be interesting. (Please note that I'm asking this to get the other side of the story about this, I'm not trying to shoot the messenger :) )
OK, now for my offtopic question. I think you're probably the perfect person to ask this.
https://github.com/HackerNews/API (linked from the bottom of every HN page except the add-comment page) describes HN's Firebase-based API. The current API design tends to require a lot of discrete requests to get at high-level information due to the fact that it doesn't support batching (and the page acknowledges this, with "It's not the ideal public API, but it's the one we could release in the time we had.").
Now... that page also says "There is currently no rate limit."
For some time I've wanted to track page votes over time. These are not logged, so this operation is necessarily very realtime. There are lots of posts, and when one of them goes viral the vote goes up very quickly. Perhaps you can see where this is going :)
If I wanted to try and overcome the poor API design by requesting individual items every 500ms or 250ms, or 100ms.... or 50ms......
a) at what point am I likely to get hard IP-blocked? (I'm also wondering how bad it/I would be if I used a bunch of different IPs, at least in terms of technical load.)
b) what rate should I tend to prefer so I can be nice to HN (I'm not sure what tier they're on)?