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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

(www.recall.ai)
570 points davidgu | 1 comments | 07 Jul 25 14:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.616s | source
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sleepy_keita ◴[11 Jul 25 01:04 UTC] No.44527431[source]▶
LISTEN/NOTIFY was always a bit of a puzzler for me. Using it means you can't use things like pgbouncer/pgpool and there are so many other ways to do this, polling included. I guess it could be handy for an application where you know it won't scale and you just want a simple, one-dependency database.
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1. nightfly ◴[11 Jul 25 01:26 UTC] No.44527549[source]▶
> I guess it could be handy for an application where you know it won't scale and you just want a simple, one-dependency database

That's where we use it at my work. We have host/networking deployment pipelines that used to have up to one minute latency on each step because each was ran on a one-minute cron. A short python script/service that handled the LISTENing + adding NOTIFYs when the next step was ready removed the latency and we'll never do enough for the load on the db to matter