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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: 0.51s | source
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deadbabe ◴[11 Jul 25 00:03 UTC] No.44527057[source]▶
Honestly this article is ridiculous. Most people do not have tens of thousands of concurrent writers. And most applications out there are read heavy, not write. Which means you probably have read replicas distributing loads.

Use LISTEN/NOTIFY. You will get a lot of utility out of it before you’re anywhere close to these problems.

replies(2): >>44527789 #>>44549312 #
1. acdha ◴[11 Jul 25 02:08 UTC] No.44527789[source]▶
I would phrase this as “know where your approach hits scaling walls”. You’re right that many people never need more than LISTEN/NOTIFY but the reason that advice became so popular was the wave of people who had jumped straight into running some complicated system like Kafka when they hadn’t done any analysis to justify it; it would be nice if the lesson we taught was that you should do some analysis rather than just picking one popular option.