From pg-boss to Cloud Tasks: Fixing Queue Bursts and DB Connection Failures on Serverless

At Twio we picked pg-boss for our job queue, ran into trouble when we went serverless, looked at Pub/Sub, and ended up on Google Cloud Tasks. This is what each queue got right, what it got wrong for our workload, and the rule we landed on for choosing between them. The workload Twio is an AI SaaS for loan brokers. The piece that needs a job queue is email processing: download an email, parse the body and attachments, OCR, classify with an LLM, write structured data, and index for RAG. One email with five attachments easily becomes 30+ background jobs. A batch upload becomes hundreds. Why pg-boss worked — until it didn't Our database was Postgres on Neon, so pg-boss was the obvious starting point. No extra infrastructure, and one feature we genuinely loved: transactional enqueue . Because jobs live in the same database as business data, you can create a job in the same transaction as the row that triggered it. No dual-write problem, no "DB succeeded but the queue API failed" inconsistency. It also gave us retries, delayed jobs, dead-letter queues, dedup keys, and full SQL visibility into stuck or failed jobs. For a Postgres-first app on always-on infra, it's an excellent tool. Then we moved heavy processing to Cloud Run, and the cracks showed up. pg-boss polls. Neon suspends. They want opposite things. pg-boss runs a query roughly every 1–2 seconds to look for the next job, plus maintenance queries. Neon autosuspends compute when nothing touches the database. If the queue is polling every second, Neon's idle timer never expires — you pay for always-on compute even when the queue is empty. Worse, when Neon did manage to suspend, the next poll had to wake it. That wake-up takes hundreds of ms to a few seconds, and queries that triggered it would fail with Connection terminated , ECONNRESET , or timeouts. Pooled connections made it worse: the pool kept sockets that the server had already closed during suspend, and the next polling cycle picked one up and broke. This isn