Full disclosure: former Parse Push tech lead, current Firebase engineer. If your slowdown is only while the device is on mobile, it's almost certainly due to something outside of the Parse stack. Push notifications have grown to be an async information pipe, but never a real-time or reliable one. The most common example of this is APNs (Apple's push network)--Apple only buffers the most recent undelivered notification for an (app, device) pair and messages without UI (aka "silent push") must be sent at a low priority which will likely incur extra delays. If your goal for silent push is to help improve cache hits by pre-populating an app with useful data, don't worry about the slowdown. If you're using push for something that must be reliable or real time, you're probably using the wrong tool. Consider something like Firebase for this instead. If you're already deeply invested in Parse, I've seen people use Parse Cloud Code to replicate writes against Firebase and use Firebase to build a client sync layer.