This was an atomic snapshot put in recovery and happily reading WALs from the repo. It's consistent and allows read-only querying. It's replayed a few days worth of WALs and was previously running with a recovery_target_xid = $some-xid which apparently was never hit and/or aborted. It would not promote then, after pg_ctl promote. The 'promote' file did get created in pgdata. Now it's running again with recovery.conf that contains just... standby_mode = on restore_command = 'cp /somedir/%f %p' Still it fails to respond to the issuance of a promote. There is no trigger file config's in recovery.conf and we have never needed to do same since pg_ctl promote usually works. Any idea what's causing this? Thanks version ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PostgreSQL 9.6.6 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.4) 5.4.0 20160609, 64-bit (1 row) -- Jerry Sievers Postgres DBA/Development Consulting e: postgres.consulting@xxxxxxxxxxx p: 312.241.7800