While setting up Hot Standby, it's not a method to copy the primary database using dump and restore it on standby using restore command as it's a logical backup. I doubt your WAL archiving is enabled and files are copied to archive destination that set in archive_command therefore keep accumulating under pg_xlog directory.
For hot standby setup, archiving must be enabled and online backup (file system level) needs to be taken for setting up Standby server and recovery.conf need to be prepared on slave server.
2) we did an import of a db that wan backed up via pg_dump
The pg_xlog directory has > 1700 files in it, It seems that the slave is way behind which I get since we just imported a 55GB database but the slave is not removing it's local pg_xlog wal files.
We actually stopped the import when the slave hit 97% full for the file system where we have it's pg_xlog directory mounted after like 30minutes the file count in the slave's pg_xlog dir has not changed.
Any thoughts per why the slave is not removing these files?
