Best practices for scaling a multiplayer game backend on GCP using Firebase and Cloud Functions
Can someone help me understand After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out... While developing a multiplayer game with real-time interactions, our team needs to ensure that the backend is scalable to handle an ever-growing number of players. We’ve chosen to use Firebase for user authentication and real-time database functionalities, alongside GCP Cloud Functions for serverless backend operations. One challenge we’ve faced is managing the connection limits with Firebase. Currently, we have around 500 active users, but we expect that number to increase significantly. I’ve read about sharding strategies and leveraging Firestore for better scalability, but I’m unsure how to implement these effectively without disrupting our existing setup. To get a better grasp, I’ve experimented with splitting our user data across multiple Firestore collections and using Cloud Functions to manage the load. For instance, my current code for handling user connections looks like this: ```javascript const functions = require('firebase-functions'); const admin = require('firebase-admin'); admin.initializeApp(); exports.onUserConnect = functions.database.ref('/users/{userId}/status').onWrite((change, context) => { const status = change.after.val(); // Update user status return admin.database().ref('/userStatus').child(context.params.userId).set(status); }); ``` Yet, during load testing, I noticed that latency increases significantly when handling over 200 concurrent connections. For better performance, I’ve considered utilizing Pub/Sub to decouple some processes like chat messaging and events, but I'm not sure about the best way to integrate them. Additionally, I’ve been looking into using Cloud Run for certain features that require heavier processing. My concern is how to effectively scale these services without incurring high costs. Any insights on optimizing Firebase with Cloud Functions, best practices for using Pub/Sub, or recommendations for integrating Cloud Run would be incredibly valuable. I want to ensure that our architecture can sustain a community of thousands without major bottlenecks. Thanks in advance for the help! Any ideas what could be causing this? Has anyone dealt with something similar? My development environment is Windows 11. For reference, this is a production web app. Any feedback is welcome!