max_standby_archive_delay

Type: integer
Default: 30000 (30s)
Min: -1 (-1)
Max: 2147483647 (2147483647ms)
Unit: milliseconds (ms)
Context: sighup
Restart: false

When hot standby is active, this parameter determines how long the standby server should wait before canceling standby queries that conflict with about-to-be-applied WAL entries, as described in hot-standby-conflict. max_standby_archive_delay applies when WAL data is being read from WAL archive (and is therefore not current). If this value is specified without units, it is taken as milliseconds. The default is 30 seconds. A value of -1 allows the standby to wait forever for conflicting queries to complete. This parameter can only be set in the postgresql.conf file or on the server command line.

Note that max_standby_archive_delay is not the same as the maximum length of time a query can run before cancellation; rather it is the maximum total time allowed to apply any one WAL segment's data. Thus, if one query has resulted in significant delay earlier in the WAL segment, subsequent conflicting queries will have much less grace time.

Recommendations

If you are replicating primarily for failover, set this to a very low value (like 0) in order to keep the standby as up to date as possible. If this standby is running queries as its primary role, set to the length of time of the longest-running query you want to allow.

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