Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY hits 60k writes per second
DBOS published an engineering benchmark detailing how PostgreSQL's built-in LISTEN/NOTIFY feature can reliably back real-time data streams at high throughput. While conventional wisdom cautions against using LISTEN/NOTIFY for high-concurrency event streaming due to lock contention during transaction commits, DBOS demonstrates that optimized streaming patterns enable a single Postgres server to achieve 60,000 writes per second at millisecond-scale latency, removing the need for auxiliary message brokers in many architectures.
Developers often prematurely introduce dedicated message brokers like Redis or Kafka, underestimating how far native PostgreSQL primitives can scale when properly tuned.
- –Demonstrates sustaining up to 60,000 writes per second on a single Postgres instance with millisecond-scale latency.
- –Overcomes historical lock contention bottlenecks commonly associated with Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY commits.
- –Simplifies backend system design by retaining pub/sub messaging inside the primary database.
DISCOVERED
3h ago
2026-07-24
PUBLISHED
4h ago
2026-07-24
RELEVANCE
AUTHOR
KraftyOne