OneSignal Breaks Throughput Record and Delivers 4 Billion Push Notifications

OneSignal set a new throughput record delivering 850,000+ notifications per second - more than twice the competition.

OneSignal sends 4 billion push notifications per day, up 25% since September. The platform is used by 550,000+ developers and marketing teams including many Fortune 500 Companies.

Election News Powered by OneSignal

On election day, push notifications played a critical role in determining where Americans got their news. A Neiman study showed that users who receive notifications from a news app are more than twice as engaged as compared to a control group.

Top news sites began adopting push notifications when Apple introduced them in 2009, thereby setting a new standard for the dissemination of breaking news. Today, over half of US smartphone users get news via push notifications.
OneSignal powers push notifications for top news outlets in the US and internationally. Over 150 million people internationally get their news via OneSignal’s push notifications.

“News outlets require speed and reliability to deliver ‘Breaking News’ messages.  The leaders in news are finding the best option is OneSignal.” explained OneSignal’s CRO, Josh Wetzel.

OneSignal set a new throughput record using bleeding edge hardware, a custom delivery engine built with Rust, and a highly optimized network infrastructure.

“OneSignal is a technology company at its core,” says George Deglin, OneSignal’s CEO. “Our deep understanding and passion for building software and hardware enables us to provide unmatched speed, customization and reliability which exceeds our clients’ expectations.”

Hardware: NVMe SSDs

OneSignal’s dedicated database servers leverage NVMe SSDs, which provide read speeds of 5GB/second and 1,000,000 4k IOPS. The hardware makes OneSignal 500% faster than systems using traditional SSDs.

Programming Language: Rust

OneSignal’s notification delivery stack is written in Rust, a blazingly fast systems programming language. Rust is designed to guarantee thread safety and prevent segfaults - this means OneSignal can ensure reliability for even the most demanding workloads.

Notification Delivery: Lightspeed

For clients where delivery speed is mission-critical, OneSignal built Lightspeed technology. Notification delivery is parallelized across 32 threads and sent using an optimized network stack and hardware that is provisioned to handle high bursts of notification traffic.

OneSignal aims to power the world’s messages. 500,000+ developers use OneSignal’s platform to deliver mobile push notifications, web push notifications, and email messages. The company was founded in 2014 by Y Combinator alums George Deglin and Long Vo. OneSignal is venture-backed by SignalFire and Rakuten Capital. The company is based in San Mateo and growing fast - onesignal.com/careers.