[Pgpool-general] pgpool-II features doubts

[Pedro Silva]

Hi Guys,

I'm staring with pgpool-II and currently have configured a pgpool front-end with 
two backed receiving connections.
My configuration is pretty straight forward as I've only changed the default 
configuration to replication_mode = true and load_balancing_mode = true .

I've already started my web applications that use hibernate, and perform heavy 
database insertion on startup, and everything seems to be working fine, at least 
all data is consistent on both back ends.

I have several doubts regarding this configuration as it not explicit(at least 
for me) by reading the documentation. Here are some of the questions if someone 
would please be able to answer me.

1.I would like to understand if my current configuration is a really 
master-master configuration?

2. Load Balancing as it is activated will distribute my SELECT queries between 
my two backends.

3. If I now setup online recovery it doesn't matter if backend1 one or backend2 
fails because recovery works from the one that is running, right?

4. It is my understanding that recovery phase 1 will only finish when clients 
terminate their connections. Won't this be a problem due to the fact that web 
applications have normally a pool of connections that is kept between the 
database and the application? This way the connections will never end and phase 
1 won't finish, right?

Feel free to answer if you can provide some enlightenment to this.
Thanks in advance!
Pedro