Warm standby can't start because logs stream too quickly from the master

Looking at the startup process: postgres 16749 4.1 6.7 17855104 8914544 ? Ss 18:36 0:44 postgres: startup process recovering 0000000800005B1C00000030 Then a few seconds later: postgres 16749 4.2 7.0 17855104 9294172 ? Ss 18:36 0:47 postgres: startup process recovering 0000000800005B1C00000047 It's replaying logs from the master, but it's always a few behind, so startup never finishes. Here's a demonstration: # while :; do echo $(ls data/pg_xlog/ | grep -n $(ps aux | egrep "startup process" | awk '{print $15}')) $(ls data/pg_xlog/ | wc -l); sleep 1; done # current replay location # number of WALs in pg_xlog 1655:0000000800005B1C00000064 1659 1656:0000000800005B1C00000065 1660 1658:0000000800005B1C00000067 1661 1659:0000000800005B1C00000068 1662 1660:0000000800005B1C00000069 1663 Generally this works itself out if I wait (sometimes a really long time). Is there a configuration option that allows a warm standby to start without having fully replayed the logs from the master? * Note: wal_keep_segments is set to 8192 on these servers, which have large disks, to allow for recovery within a couple of hours of a failover without resorting to restoring from archive * This is specifically an issue for pgpool recovery, which fails if a standby can't start within (by default) 300 seconds. Open to toggling that param if there's no way around this.