How Notion Handles 200+ BILLION Notes (Without Crashing)

Notion’s 200-Billion-Note Machine, Explained in 2 Minutes Every paragraph, checkbox, or emoji in Notion is a “block” row in PostgreSQL. When that single DB hit 20 billion blocks, latency spiked and index bloat set in. Sharding by workspace_id, Notion got 480 logical shards spread across 96 Postgres instances, all routed with a simple hash(workspace_id) % 480. Find the key lessons about choosing boring tech stack and attitude towards observability. #performance #observability

How Notion uses horizontal scalability and sharding to handle 200+ billion notes without crashing.