zlacker

>>anonu+(OP)
Author here! A few updates since this was published two years ago:

- The service mentioned (now called https://webapp.io ) eventually made it into YC (S20) and still uses postgres as its pub/sub implementation, doing hundreds of thousands of messages per day. The postgres instance now runs on 32 cores and 128gb of memory and has scaled well.

- We bolstered Postgres's PUBLISH with Redis pub/sub for high traffic code paths, but it's been nice having ACID guarantees as the default for less popular paths (e.g., webhook handling)

- This pattern only ever caused one operational incident, where a transaction held a lock which caused the notification queue to start growing, and eventually (silently) stop sending messages, starting postgres with statement_timeout=(a few days) was enough to solve this

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484215

Happy to answer any questions!

>>colinc+be
> doing hundreds of thousands of messages per day

> The postgres instance now runs on 32 cores and 128gb of memory and has scaled well.

Am I the only one?

>>boomsk+Ye
I assume that is their main database for everything, not just for pub/sub. One of the big benefits of doing it that way is that you have proper transaction handling across jobs and their related data.