psql 8 warm standby strong start, weak finish

Hello, psql family.

psql (8.4.7)

I am having mixed results for a warm standby.  My warm standby appears to work for a couple of days and then refuses to
processany more WAL files. 

I will see lovely entries like this in standby.log:
removing "/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000E9"
...
Trigger file            : /tmp/pgsql.trigger
Waiting for WAL file    : 00000001000010E5000000EF
WAL file path           : /var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000EF
Restoring to            : pg_xlog/RECOVERYXLOG
Sleep interval          : 2 seconds
Max wait interval       : 0 forever
Command for restore     : cp "/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000EF" "pg_xlog/RECOVERYXLOG"
Keep archive history    : 00000001000010E5000000EA and later

And then /var/lib/pgsql/archives/ will continue to grow because it won't process any more WAL files.

Here's the suspicious part.  The 00000001000010E5000000EF WAL in question above is the last file to be listed in
standby.log,and it is a different size from all the rest.  Is there any chance that my end rsync-ed it over from the
masterto the standby before the master had fully written it out, so the standby sees it as incomplete and gets stuck?
Oris it normal to see a WAL that isn't 16MB?  My rsync deletes the sent files from the master, so I have nothing to
checkit against. 

-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Apr 29 05:07 00000001000010E5000000EA
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Apr 29 05:11 00000001000010E5000000EB
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Apr 29 05:15 00000001000010E5000000EC
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Apr 29 05:15 00000001000010E5000000ED
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Apr 29 05:15 00000001000010E5000000EE
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 12337152 Apr 29 05:20 00000001000010E5000000EF
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Apr 29 05:25 00000001000010E5000000F0
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Apr 29 05:30 00000001000010E5000000F1

And on the master, everything looks good in the logs:

`pg_xlog/00000001000010E5000000EC' -> `/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000EC'
`pg_xlog/00000001000010E5000000ED' -> `/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000ED'
`pg_xlog/00000001000010E5000000EE' -> `/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000EE'
`pg_xlog/00000001000010E5000000EF' -> `/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000EF'
`pg_xlog/00000001000010E5000000F0' -> `/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000F0'
`pg_xlog/00000001000010E5000000F1' -> `/var/lib/pgsql/archives/00000001000010E5000000F1'

I have read around and don't see that my nightly vacuum and pg_dump of the master should have any negative affects on
mystandby.  But if you disagree, please let me know. 

TIA.




Charlton Galvarino
1 (803) 233-6205 : voice
1 (803) 223-9579 : fax
charlton@2creek.com

P.O. Box 50960
Columbia, SC 29250