Up to Postgres 9.4, when a node in recovery checks for the availability of WAL from a source, be it a WAL stream, WAL archive or local pg_xlog and that it fails to obtain what it wanted, it has to wait for a mount of 5s, amount of time hardcoded directly in xlog.c. 9.5 brings more flexibility with a built-in parameter allowing to control this interval of time thanks to this commit:
Read more...