[sararob]

[Firebase Dev Advocate here] We don't currently have rate limits. I'd recommend using our SDKs, they handle connections more efficiently than dealing with the REST API. You can also run your own server process using our Node (https://www.npmjs.org/package/firebase) or Java libraries (https://www.firebase.com/docs/android/quickstart.html).

[bambax]

Thanks for answering.

I'd rather use the REST API directly, for what I need is rather simple and not downloading, installing and maintaining an SDK is more appealing. (My app was developed a while ago and was doing HTML scraping, but the 30-second limit on HN killed it, because of testing -- I don't need to query more often than twice per minute, but while testing I ran the thing a little too often).

So, what are the limits on the REST API, and how do limits work? (A max number of requests per hour would be better than per minute for example).

[dmunoz]

Any kind of rate limitations with the REST API we should be made aware of?

[kevin]

You really want to use the Firebase SDKs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423055

[sararob]

There are currently no rate limits on the REST API.

[javajosh]

This implies that your SDKs don't use your own REST API. What do they use instead?

[sararob]

We establish a websocket connection and fall back to long polling when appropriate. This SO question has more details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12591011/firebase-with-mo...