I work on Firebase now, though not the DB team anymore. I'd love more data on how the DB is being outperformed if you're willing to share. Was it write throughout? Read throughout? Latency? Were you using small or large object sizes? Were indexes and ACLs used in both cases? Are you sure your firebase layout used best practices? Have you run the test lately to verify whether the findings are still true?
We also do have some benchmarks comparing real-time performance, which are under submission at a scientific conference, so we cannot share them yet.
Unfortunately, testing against Firebase using established benchmarks such as YCSB is not very useful, as it's unclear which limits are enforced on purpose and which limits are inherent to the database design. Would you be open to providing a Firebase setup for heavy load testing w.r.t. to throughput, latency and consistency?
Wow, the presentation here is really polished. Kudos!
For any readers, the test AFAICT is time to last byte for a single reader. It's a bit unfortunate that it seems local caching is affecting the bagend result by the time you switch the comparison to Firebase (though in full disclosure, Firebase's local cache isn't available on JS so that's a bit on us too).
I could give a few perf tips on the data layout for Firebase but it isn't clear whether the toy app has intentional indirection to model something more real.
