Firebase Storage very slow compared to Firebase Hosting

22
votes

Anyone know why firebase storage would be so ridiculously slow compared to firebase hosting?

Results

  • Time to download image of firebase hosting: 16ms
  • Time to download same image from firebase storage: 2.23s (2.22s is TTFB)
  • Time to download same image from firebase storage (Asia Pacific Region): 1.72s (1.70s is TTFB)
  • (File size: 22.7kb / jpeg / firebase storage has read open to everyone)

This is repeated over and over in tests. Is there any way to speed this up to a decent time, or is firebase storage unusable for small files (images/thumbs)?

For Comparison

  • S3 North Cal - approximately 500ms
  • S3 Asia Pacific - Approximately 30ms
  • Cloudinary - Approximately 20ms

Extra info:

  • I am based in Australia.
  • Exact same files. Always images under 100kb.
  • The slow down is always in the TTFB according to dev tools.
  • Hosting URL: https://.firebaseapp.com/images/thumb.jpg
  • Storage URL: https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/.appspot.com/o/thumb.jpg?alt=media&token=
3
firebasefirebase-storagefirebase-hosting
So currently there are really no option to use firebase storage for photos with reasonable downloading time? It's about 10 times slower than getting photo from my ftp server (10$ per year). It's difficult to believe that such a big service like firebase has that kind of problem. I found that here console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser I can set every photo to have a public link and then getting photo from that public link is blazing fast (about 50ms). So now the question is: is there any way to make every uploaded photo public? – Żywy
Makin every photo public is now available, using the GUI in cloud console. – DauleDK

3 Answers

18
votes

I found the solution.

If you have your files already uploaded to storage go to: https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser?project=your_project > pick your bucket > select all interesting files and click Make public (or something similar - I'm not english native).

To have all new uploaded files public by default you need to install Google cloud SDK (https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/) and from your command line use the following command for your bucket:

gsutil defacl set public-read gs://your_bucket

After that all my current and new images are available here storage.googleapis.com/my_project.appspot.com/img/image_name.jpg and downloading time is definitely shorter.

2
votes

Hosting = Storage + CDN, so really what you're seeing is you hitting a CDN near you, rather than going directly to the GCS or S3 bucket. Same is true with Cloudinary/Imgix. This is why performance is so much better for Hosting than Storage.

Addressing the issue of TTFB being so different between AWS and GCP: unfortunately this is a known issue of GCS vs S3 (see this great blog post w/ in depth perf analysis). I know this team is working to address this problem, but going the "stick a CDN in front of it" route will provide a faster solution (provided you don't need to restrict access, or your CDN can authorize requests).

Note: GCP has announced a Sydney region (announcement blog post) to be launched in 2017, which might help you.

0
votes

In addition to @Ziwi answer. I think it is also ok to change rules directly in Firebase

// Only a user can upload their profile picture, but anyone can view it
service firebase.storage {
  match /b/<bucket>/o {
    match /users/{userId}/profilePicture.png {
      allow read;
      allow write: if request.auth.uid == userId;
    }
  }
}

The source is https://firebase.googleblog.com/2016/07/5-tips-for-firebase-storage.html

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