Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY can scale to 60K writes per second with careful stream design and tuning

The article argues that Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY is often dismissed unfairly as unscalable due to misunderstood performance behavior around a global lock. The authors describe using it for low-latency streams and pub/sub, ultimately reaching 60K writes per second on a single Postgres server with millisecond-scale latency.

This suggests Postgres can handle more real-time application patterns than many teams assume, reducing the need for separate messaging systems in some architectures. The broader trend is toward simplifying infrastructure by pushing streaming workloads into databases when latency, durability, and operational tradeoffs are acceptable.