Making Postgres queues scale

Opening excerpt

Mike Stonebraker & Cockroach Labs: Agents on ACID? Pricing Customers Resources Docs Blog Explore … Sign in Get started July 24: DBOS User Group Meeting Customers Pricing Blog Docs Resources Start your project Login Login Start your project Back to posts Postgres Queues Actually Scale Qian Li Peter Kraft June 2, 2026 How To Add to Google Share this post The conventional wisdom around Postgres-backed queues is that they don’t scale. To handle a large workload, you can’t use Postgres, but instead need a dedicated queueing system like RabbitMQ + Celery or Redis + BullMQ. There’s a reason people say this: queues really are a demanding workload for Postgres. At scale, thousands of workers are polling your queues table at the same time, creating contention and churning indexes. But with the right optimizations, Postgres can handle it. In this blog post, we’ll show how we optimized Postgres-backed queues at scale, achieving 30K workflow executions per second across thousands of servers.

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