Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale (via) I think this headline is justified. Recall.ai, a provider of meeting transcription bots, noticed that their PostgreSQL instance was being bogged down by heavy concurrent writes.
After some spelunking they found this comment in the PostgreSQL source explaining that transactions with a pending notification take out a global lock against the entire PostgreSQL instance (represented by database 0) to ensure "that queue entries appear in commit order".
Moving away from LISTEN/NOTIFY to trigger actions on changes to rows gave them a significant performance boost under high write loads.
Recent articles
- Claude Code for web - a new asynchronous coding agent from Anthropic - 20th October 2025
- Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an NVIDIA Spark via brute force using Claude Code - 20th October 2025
- Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP - 16th October 2025