Firebase having thousands of on() event listeners good design - angularjs

Question

We need to run some operation on our Firebase DB and manipulate data after certain input is given by user from the Mobile Device modifying a flag.
Currently we are using on() to listen to particular flag in each users node. We are running this listener from a Nodejs server hosted on Heruku.
If we plan to have 100 thousand users we will have 100 thousand listener. One listener for each users flag which is waiting to be manipulated by user on the Mobile device.
Is this a good design in terms of Firebase?
Ideally we can create a REST API which is called by users and then on the Node JS server we can manipulate the data.
What is the best way to run background operation on Data on Firebase based on user input?
We were using Parse earlier and it was easy to achieve this using Parse Cloud code. With Firebase we are having issues because of this.

Answer 1

If we plan to have 100 thousand users we will have 100 thousand listener. One listener for each users flag which is waiting to be manipulated by user on the Mobile device.
This sounds like a bad data design. While it is definitely possible to listen for changes to hundreds of thousands of items, it shouldn't require hundreds of thousands listeners.
My guess (because you didn't include a snippet of your JSON) is that you have a structure similar to this:
users
$uid
name: "user6155746"
flag: "no"
And you're attaching a listener in just the flag of each user with something like:
ref.child('users').on('child_added', function(userSnapshot) {
userSnapshot.ref().child('flag').on('value', function(flagSnapshot) {
console.log('the flag changed to '+flagSnapshot.val());
});
})
In code this is simple, in practice you'll have a hard time managing the "flag listeners". When will you remove them? Do you keep a list of them?
All of these things become a list simpler if you isolate the information that you're interested in in the JSON tree:
users
$uid
name: "user6155746"
userFlags
$uid: "no"
Now you can just listen on userFlags to see if the flag of any user has changed:
ref.child('userFlags').on('child_changed', function(userSnapshot) {
console.log('Flag of user '+userSnapshot.key()+' changed to '+userSnapshot.val());
});
With this you have a single listener, monitoring the flag of potentially hundreds of thousands of users.