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0 pointssuperfrank8y ago0 comments

> Their server just fails and takes down the DB for 10 or so mins if I do that query.

I don't know if you are aware, but their DB can't handle more than 1000 requests/sec, so if you are iterating through a list of nodes and requesting data for each one you can hit that limit (not a good practice, but sometimes you have to). Additionally, once you hit that limit, the DB slows down but keeps accepting requests meaning, if you keep hitting it, even at a slower rate you make the backlog worse. Seriously, be very very careful not to go over that limit, we found out the hard way.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

asadlionpk8y ago· 3 in thread

Iterating would require me to first get atleast a 'shallow' list of keys for that node. But even that one REST query for shallow list of all keys crashes their server instance.

I am not even sure how I should get keys for all my user nodes anymore.

I tried doing it from an offline JSON backup they generate. But that one giant 100GB+ JSON is impossible to parse with any available tools.

pjc508y ago

Hmm. Congratulations, you've nerd-sniped me this morning!

This sounds like a classic use case for a streaming parser. The data is a mile wide and an inch deep, so at any point the memory requirements should not be too high.

What do you want to do when you've parsed it? Insert it into a real database? Iterate over it? Would simply turning it into a list of user IDs one per line suffice?

asadlionpk8y ago

Hello. The JSON dump looks something like this:

  {
    users: {
      "userid1": {...},
      ...
    },

    ...
  }

I have tried jq stream parser to split the big dump into files like: - users.json - chatrooms.json - ... So I can then work on individual nodes.

But jq fails silently after 12-24 hours of processing. I am still researching this in free time.

If I can just get the keys (like "userid1") I can do the rest from firebase itself.

3 more replies

karma_fountain8y ago

It's not impossible. You can do it pretty simply using https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ijson

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