Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY scalability deep-dive highly actionable for backend engineers.
Summary
Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY can scale to 60K writes per second with millisecond latency on a single server, contrary to its reputation. The bottleneck is a global exclusive lock taken during NOTIFY to enforce commit-order notification delivery, which limited a naive trigger-based implementation to 2.9K writes per second. DBOS optimized this by batching notifications and decoupling the NOTIFY call from the write transaction, avoiding the lock contention.