How fast Fóir answers

Websites and content

Published content is served from a shared cache, so most visitors never reach the database. A cached page comes back in a median of 7 ms, and within 46 ms for 95 requests in every 100, with 1,200 requests a second arriving.

A page that isn't cached yet is built in a median of 262 ms, with every access rule applied to every record it reads.

When you publish, readers keep getting the previous version while the new one is built, so a publish never makes a visitor wait.

Reads through the shared read lane are also kept at Cloudflare's edge, close to your visitors, and a full page comes back from there in a median of 28 ms.

Applications

When Fóir is your app's backend, most requests come from someone signed in. They skip the shared cache and go to the database with your access rules applied to that person.

A signed-in customer reading one of their own records gets an answer in a median of 111 ms, and within 189 ms for 95 requests in every 100. Saving a change takes 188 ms, and a read straight after it sees the change in 112 ms. Those times are taken from outside the data centre, so they include the trip there and back.

Those times include the row-level security check on every row, which a hand-built backend would have to add on top of its own numbers. You declare who can see what, and Demesne, our open-source authorisation engine, writes the policies.

Compared with EmDash

On EmDash's default install, a page of plain text took between 0.39 and 0.94 seconds to its first byte in ytyng's measurements. A Fóir page comes from Cloudflare's edge in a median of 28 ms, and one that isn't cached is built in 262 ms, with its references resolved and every access rule applied.

Compared with Supabase

Supabase's guide to row-level security shows a policy written the obvious way spending 171 ms in the database to read a table of 100,000 rows, until it is rewritten and indexed by hand. On Fóir the policies come written for you, and a signed-in customer's whole request takes 111 ms from outside the data centre.

Compared with Firebase

Firebase's security rules can look up at most 10 other documents to decide whether someone may read one. Fóir's access rules run in the database itself, so a rule can follow a person through their organisations and grants without a budget of lookups.