We are building a social media web app using firebase and use firestore to store users and their posts.

When a user likes a post, we save it in posts/{postID}/likedBy/{userID} and also update totalLikes in the post document.

Let's say our app has 1 million daily users, and they all are liking viral posts very frequently.

Now, firebase says that a document cannot handle more than one write per second. However, we've seen that we can update the document several times per second, but they still don't recommend it.

My question is, what is the best way to store total post likes in firestore, if there's any. Or, should we use some other services?

Because this is the main feature for any social media app. We really need a workaround for this.

I'm not a beginner in firebase and always ready to experiment new things, so any suggestion would be really helpful.

CodePudding user response：

Let's say our app has 1 million daily users, and they all are liking viral posts very frequently.

Now, firebase says that a document cannot handle more than one write per second.

My question is, what is the best way to store total post likes in firestore, if there's any. Or, should we use some other services?

This is the exact scenario for which Firebase recommends to use some distributed counters.

With distributed counterS, "each counter is a document with a subcollection of shards, and the value of the counter is the sum of the value of the shards."

"Write throughput increases linearly with the number of shards, so a distributed counter with 10 shards can handle 10x as many writes as a traditional counter." (traditional counter = counter in one document)