[traviscj]

> put everything we could into the database (work queues and pup/sub included). It was magical.

I've been building systems on some pretty similar ideas for the last 5+ years, and have a similarly optimistic outlook on it. Just to add another datapoint here, we've been able to scale them up to 20-40x higher than your figure (a couple thousand jobs/sec) on a single (albeit beefy) MySQL instance. It definitely takes a fair bit of care & we certainly have some time invested in it, but it can be done.

I guess my services haven't had (gotten to? :-) ) to share databases with other services for quite some time -- they did when I started my job! -- but even with that concession, the benefits of DB guarantees have been amazing. There's nothing like a transaction for preserving your sanity.

The best tactic I've learned from these systems is to think really hard about the batching & partitioning behavior to keep msgs/sec high enough & transactions/sec low enough to stay afloat.