Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales

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 LISTEN/NOTIFY Actually Scales Peter Kraft July 24, 2026 How To Add to Google Share this post Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY has a bad reputation thanks in part to a popular blog post asserting it does not scale . If that were true, it would be a shame, because LISTEN/NOTIFY is a powerful tool, allowing you to use your Postgres database for low-latency durable notifications, streams, and pub/sub. The accusations aren’t wrong: NOTIFY has unintuitive and undocumented performance characteristics arising from its use of a global lock. But “unintuitive behavior” is not the same as “not scalable.” In this blog post, we’ll show how we optimized LISTEN/NOTIFY-backed streams at scale, achieving 60K writes per second on a single Postgres server with millisecond-scale latency.

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