Firebase data structure - is the Firefeed structure relevant?

Question

Firefeed is a very nice example of what can be achieved with Firebase - a fully client side Twitter clone. So there is this page : https://firefeed.io/about.html where the l

Answer 1

With denormalized data, the only way to connect data is to write to every location its read from. So yeah, to publish a tweet to 61 million followers would require 61 million writes.

You wouldn't do this in the browser. The server would listen for child_added events for new tweets, and then a cluster of workers would split up the load paginating a subset of followers at a time. You could potentially prioritize online users to get writes first.

With normalized data, you write the tweet once, but pay for the join on reads. If you cache the tweets in feeds to avoid hitting the database for each request, you're back to 61 million writes to redis for every Katy Perry tweet. To push the tweet in real time, you need to write the tweet to a socket for every online follower anyway.