DBOS hits 60K writes/sec with Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY, challenging the case for external brokers

DBOS achieved 60,000 writes per second on a single Postgres server using optimized LISTEN/NOTIFY streams, up from 2,900 initially. The bottleneck was not the mechanism itself but a global exclusive lock held during commit and fsync. Published July 24, 2026, the findings suggest teams may not need Kafka or Redis by default — the ceiling is diagnosable and avoidable.