Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

In DBOS, workflows can be invoked directly as normal function calls or enqueued. Direct calls don't require any polling. For queued workflows, each process runs a lightweight polling thread that checks for new work using `SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED` with exponential backoffs to prevent contentions, so many concurrent workers can poll efficiently. We recently wrote a blog post on durable workflows, queues, and optimizations: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/why-postgres-durable-execution

Throughput mainly comes down to database writes: executing a workflow = 2 writes (input + output), each step = 1 write. A single Postgres instance can typically handle thousands of writes per second, and a larger one can handle tens of thousands (or even more, depending on your workload size). If you need more capacity, you can shard your app across multiple Postgres servers.



Even though I don't use DBOS, that blog post is gold.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: