Postgres Streaming Replication lagging, using lots of CPU and little I/O
Current (true at least in PostgreSQL 9.4 and older) PostgreSQL releases have single-threaded WAL recovery.

This means that replay of the write-ahead log occurs in only one recovery worker, and is thus able to benefit less from I/O concurrency than a normal running master. This can result in WAL replay lagging behind in cases where the replica and master have similar hardware, even when you'd expect the master (which is generally also under more load) to be the slower server.

(It'd be  great to improve this, but wanted it enough to do the work yet, and nobody seems keen to fund it at the moment).

That said, your case with very high CPU use doesn't seem to fit with issues of low I/O concurrency. In your situation I'd be attaching gdb and seeing what the replay proess was doing, or using perf top to examine what the system as a whole is up to, then dig deeper with perf once I had some clues. I'd also be looking closely at iotop, vmstat, iostat, the PostgreSQL logs, dmesg, etc.

After investigation

Profiles revealed that most time was being spent in DropRelFileNodeBuffers.

That does a linear scan through shared_buffers whenever a relfilenode is deleted - caused by truncate, drop table, cluster, drop index, etc. This must be done during WAL replay, as well as on the main node.

So this suggests that:


Your shared_buffers is probably very big; and
You're probably doing lots of operations that delete relfilenodes


Reducing shared_buffers on the replica may well help.