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Comment by dorfsmay | Hacker News Reader

I tried very hard to use postgres as a queue, it was robust but slow once I started to push from more than a few processes/servers. Moving to zeromq initially and sqs after solved all my perf issues, and was still solid.

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I think that’s the way to go. Start with Postgres and only if there are problems, then think about something more specialized. Same for microservices. Start simple and introduce a service when really needed.

I hate it when people already start out with 10 or more different systems/services for a few messages per second.

it's not the way to go if you hit the limits very quickly and have to waste immense time migrating.

From my experience the limits are way higher than people think.

from my experience they're actually much lower than people think, especially when using Postgres for things it's not well-suited for like queuing, and the problem is you rarely can just throw more hardware at it to solve the problem and it's really not a good place to be.

I think that using the right tool for the job is important and saves a lot of time in the long run. There are expensive headaches that we have to resolve.

I never know what to think about the phrase “ right tool for the job”. It almost feels like a platitude at this point.

Postgres is the right tool for most practical data storage jobs.

What were your experiences with ZeroMQ?

It worked fine, we had no issue with it. We moved to SQS because it was one less thing we needed to spend time on.

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