Some general best practices for running replication systems are described in this recipe.
Reading the list of best practices should be the very first thing you do when designing your database architecture. So, the best way to get ready for it is to avoid doing anything and start with the next section, How to do it....
- Use the latest release of PostgreSQL. Replication features are changing fast, with each new release improving on the previous in major ways based on our real-world experience. The idea that earlier releases are somehow more stable, and thus more easily usable, is definitely not the case for replication.
- Use similar hardware and OSes on all systems. Replication allows nodes to switch roles. If we switch over or failover to different hardware, we may get performance issues and it will be hard to maintain a smoothly running application.
- Configure all systems identically as far as possible. Use the same mount points, directory names...