If some existing listener is far behind, incoming new listener sessions
would start from that session's read pointer and then need to advance over
many already-committed notification messages, which they have no interest
in. This was expensive in itself and also thrashed the pg_notify SLRU
buffers a lot more than necessary. We can improve matters considerably
in typical scenarios, without much added cost, by starting from the
furthest-ahead read pointer, not the furthest-behind one. We do have to
consider only sessions in our own database when doing this, which requires
an extra field in the data structure, but that's a pretty small cost.
Back-patch to 9.0 where the current LISTEN/NOTIFY logic was introduced.
Matt Newell, slightly adjusted by me
aad86c518d