0.85ms writes: I re-ran Firenook's 40x claim on a 4-core VM

Firenook claims its Rust Firebase emulators write 40x faster than Google's official ones: 5.1 ms median against 208.2 ms. I installed it, ran 300 writes, 100 reads, and 20 queries against it on a 4-vCPU VM — and then audited their benchmark data, because a 40x claim deserves a second look. My median write was 0.85 ms. The claim holds up, but not for the reason the headline suggests.

What I ran

Firenook 0.2.1, installed with npm install firenook (73 MB of node_modules, a 75 MB single Rust binary inside). Node 24.22.1, a 4-vCPU VM with 8 GB of RAM. A minimal project: firebase.json with Firestore, Auth, and Storage emulators, rules wide open. No functions, no listeners, no SDK — plain Firestore REST calls over loopback, sequential, one at a time.…