Push Notification Hub is an essential internal service that plays a crucial role in the messaging and calling flows within Teams and other platforms. This article describes its recent overhaul, which has significantly enhanced its performance and reduced latencies in delivering push notifications to user devices

The Push Notification Hub (PNH) service recently went through significant modernization. We migrated from legacy components like .NET Framework 4.7.2 and custom HTTP server called “RestServer”, to .NET 8 and ASP.NET Core 8. Moreover, for handling outgoing requests, we moved from custom HTTP client/handler called “HttpPooler”, to Polly v8 and SocketsHttpHandler. This article describes the journey thus far and its impact on PNH performance.

Sections: Intro (what is PNH), expectations, measurement, migration phases (concrete tech and measurements), closing thoughts, next steps.

PNH is deriving great benefits from .NET 8. Overall performance improved, as evidenced by the Q-Factor metric, by about 70%. Performance is a major factor for a service like this and will reflect positively in basically all flows on Teams platform that got to do with messaging. The results actually exceeded our expectations by significant margin.