My reasoning was that a longer recovery time to avoid writes would be acceptable because there are two more nodes in the cluster to fall back on in case of emergency.
> My problem is that checkpoints are taking a long time. Even when I run a > few manual checkpoints one after the other, they keep taking very long, up > to 10 minutes:
You haven't said *why* this is an issue... Why are you concerned with how long it takes to do a checkpoint?
During normal operation I don't mind that it takes a long time, but when performing maintenance I want to be able to gracefully bring down the master without long delays to promote one of the standby's.
The time information is all there and it tells you what it's doing and how much had to be done... If you're unhappy with how long it takes to write out gigabytes of data and fsync hundreds of files, talk to your storage people...