Firestore DeadlineExceeded exception for big collections

After some help from the firebase support team we were able to figure out that there is indeed a bug with the python client api. There is a bugfix coming in one of the next releases. Most likely it will enable the python library to sort by documentid and therefore use start_after().

Up until then you have two possible solutions:

1. use another field to sort on and use start_after()

2. use the node.js library with paging like:

var db = admin.firestore();
admin.firestore().settings({ timestampsInSnapshots: true });
function readNextPage(lastReadDoc) {
  let query = db
    .collection(collection)
    .orderBy(admin.firestore.FieldPath.documentId())
    .limit(100);
}