Understanding streaming replication

I've been struggling with understanding all the necessary pieces for streaming replication. So I put down the pieces as I did understand them, and would appreciate if you guys could point out any of the stuff I understood or have done wrong.

The set up is pgpool + streaming replication + hot stand by. No load balancing, stand-by nodes will not receive any application queries (I don't have that big of a query load, and I don't want to risk inconsistent reads). There are no shared file systems, but there is a way to rsync/scp files between nodes. Fail-over is automatic, and should kick in within reasonably small period after master failure.

1. Archiving. Should be turned on on all the nodes. The archive command should copy the archive file to the local archive directory, and rsync archive directory between all the nodes. My understanding is that archiving is necessary if a stand-by node ever "missed" enough WAL updates to need an old enough WAL that might have been removed from pg_xlog.

QUESTION: After the failover, the new master will start archiving its WAL files. These archived WALs will not collide in any way with the archived WALs generated by previous master(s)?

QUESTION: What is a good policy for archive clean up? From the perspective to only remove archive files that are guaranteed to never be required by any nodes.

2. Failover. On master failure, pgpool will automatically select a new master, and degenerate all other nodes. The cluster is now in the emergency state and requires manual intervention for reconfiguration and recovery. pgpool executes a script to promote a node, that script will create a trigger file on a newly selected master node, and postgres will exist stand-by mode.

QUESTION: If multiple pgpools are running, and if there are no network problems, and configuration files are identical, is there any guarantee that the same stand-by node will be selected for promotion? Concern here is that with configuration of (M-SB0-SB1) one pgpool decides to promote SB0 and another - SB1, causing both of them to enter master mode, and splitting the cluster. It does look that pgpool will always select next "alive" node for promotion, but I couldn't find a definitive statement on that.

3. Recovery. That part is a bit confusing. The majority of the documentation says that in this case, the node should be re-loaded from the base backup, obtained from the master. I'm not sure why this is necessary, if there are enough archived WALs. 

QUESTION: Is there any metric to understand whether hauling base will be slower/faster than replaying missed WALs? Anyway, pgpool only has one recovery mechanism, and it does invoke a base restore from whatever current master is.

PROBLEM: This I see as a problem. The only way that I see to re-attach a node to the pgpool, short of restarting it, is to call pcp_recovery_node. This will make the master take a base back up, push it to the stand-by that needs recovery, and re-start the stand-by node. I am not sure if there is a good way to check if that node has already been recovered. That because if there are more than 2 pgpools, they both will attempt to recover the same stand-by, and this will probably get ugly.

Thank you,

  Pawel.