Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> ... sometimes the automatic recovery never initiates. It looks
> like the postmaster is waiting for the archiver to exit before it
> starts recovery, and the archiver is waiting for something, I don't
> really know what.
Can you try poking into the archiver's state with gdb? It would be
useful to see a stack trace when it's hung, as well as the local and
static variables of pgarch.c.
regards, tom lane