Witnessing standby failure with repmgr

We're setting up a PostgreSQL cluster, and we're looking at using repmgr to handle standby promotion and so on.

Our cluster has one master and a hot standby, and uses the streaming replication features of PostgreSQL 9.1.

Since we're using streaming replication, writes to the master will no longer go through when the standby fails. So we would like to use repmgr to not only promote the hot standby when the master fails, but also to use repmgr to disable streaming replication when the standby fails.

Are there any suggestions on how to do this? All the documentation seems centred around a failure with the master.

Since we're using streaming replication, writes to the master will no longer go through when the standby fails.

Not necessarily the case. This is only the case when you are setting up synchronous streaming replication. Normally the master will return immediately after it writes its own log files to disk and not wait for the slave. It is then replicated out when the slave requests.

See the synchronous_commit parameter.

I don't see why you need to futz with repmgr for this.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#25360, answer score: 3