We have a system with 1202 files in the WAL directory (pg_xlog).
When we start postmaster, it goes into the starting state for 5 minutes
and then crashes.
Questions:
1) What is the biggest number of WAL files you've seen and what were
you doing to the database at the time?
2) When postmaster starts, it replays the WAL files. During this time
any connection is rejected with an error indicating that the database
is starting up. What the longest amount of time that you'd expect
postmaster to be in the "starting up" state?