Thread: recovery lag question

Hi, I've set up a warm standby box with postgresql 8.3.8 and pg_standby. Everything seems to be ok, the wal files are being copied across and being processed during the recovery as you'd expect but I have one question. The recovery seems to be processing the final wal files at the same rate as they are generated, which is approximately every 6 minutes. This means that it is currently lagging behind the primary by about 3 hours. I assumed that the recovery would process the wal files as fast as possible until it caught up and then waited, there appears to be no load on the secondary server so I'm guessing it is sat waiting but i may be wrong. Is this the correct behaviour or is something else going on?

Thanks

John