# Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY Proven Scalable Global locking issue overcome to achieve 60K writes per second - **Source:** [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com) - **Published:** 2026-07-24 - **Topic:** [Software & Engineering](https://brifing.si/c/engineering) - **Original article:** - **On Brifing:** https://brifing.si/s/563505cf-b6a3-4d0e-aef9-1672be1fa065 ## Postgres NOTIFY's bad reputation Postgres's LISTEN/NOTIFY feature was infamous for not scaling due to global locking. While this perception spread through a popular blog post, it's now proven that with proper optimizations, the system can deliver high performance. This is particularly crucial for applications requiring real-time data streaming. ## Core challenge in stream-based architecture The main difficulty in data streams is how to alert readers when new data arrives. Continuous polling consumes resources and causes latency. LISTEN/NOTIFY offers a more efficient solution but introduces its own performance barriers that need addressing. ## Impact of global locking Postgres uses a global mutex that locks the entire system during NOTIFY operations. This creates severe bottlenecks in high-volume write scenarios. Benchmarks showed it was impossible to exceed 2,900 write operations per second due to this lock. ## Notification buffering solution The developed solution buffers NOTIFY notifications in memory and processes them in batches periodically. This approach reduces the global lock's impact by 90%, enabling 60,000 write operations per second. Buffering also allows leveraging Postgres's group commit feature. ## Maintaining order guarantees The buffering method maintains notification order guarantees while improving performance. For crash resilience, it integrates with WAL (Write-Ahead Logging) mechanism. This achieves high throughput without data loss risks. ## Game-changer for real-time systems This optimization makes Postgres viable for various real-time applications from chat platforms to financial transaction monitoring. It enables low-latency streams while preserving the database's durability and consistency advantages. ## Sources covering this story - https://www.dbos.dev/blog/postgres-listen-notify-scalability — --- _Summary written by Brifing from the original reporting. Copyright in the original article belongs to its publisher; read the full piece at the link above._