Does the firestore sdk use a connected socket to make its requests or individual http requests?

Question

I'm using the react native firebase sdk and am wondering about how the underlying network calls are implemented. When making firestore get queries, is the sdk just keeping a socket open when it's initialized and make requests over the open socket, or does it make individual http requests to an endpoint?

Specifically I'm looking for an efficient way to get a batch of documents (profile thumbnail properties given a batch of profile ids), and I saw an answer that said that firebase calls are pipelined so calling the gets in parallel is efficient. However, I'm not sure if that applies to firestore as well.

score 24 · Accepted Answer · answered May 30 '18 at 00:34

24

The Firestore SDK uses gRPC to communicate with the server. This is the same layer that many of Google's other Cloud products use under the hood. It is quite different from the Web Sockets communication layer that the Firebase Realtime Database relied on.

answered May 30 '18 at 00:34

Frank van Puffelen

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 30 '18 at 00:00

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Digging into the code it seems like the "real time" part of firebase uses websockets. The database module also has a dependency on faye-websocket

answered May 30 '18 at 00:00

Alexander Vitanov

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The question is asking about Firestore, not Realtime Database. – Doug Stevenson May 30 '18 at 04:12
@DougStevenson What technology is used behind firestore real-time polling ? – Googlian Nov 27 '22 at 07:17

Does the firestore sdk use a connected socket to make its requests or individual http requests?

2 Answers2

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