We had lately several times the same problems on Google compute engine environment with PostgreSQL streaming replication and I would like to understand reasons and if I can repair it in some smoother way.
From time to time we see some communication problems in Google's internal network in GCE datacenter and they always trigger replication lags between our PG master and its replicas. All machines are Debian-8 and PostgreSQL 9.5.
When situation happens everything seems to be OK - no errors in PG logs on master or replicas just communication between master and replicas seems to be incredibly slow or repeatedly failing so new WAL logs are transfered to replicas with big delays and therefore replication lag is still growing.
Restart of replication from within PostgreSQl or restart of PostgreSQL on replica does not really help - after several WAL logs copied using scp in recovery command communication is back in previous incredibly slow status. Only restart of the whole instance help. When whole VM is restarted communication is back to normal and recovery even from lag many hours long is done in a few minutes. So main reason for this behavior seems to be on OS level. I tried to check net traffic but without finding anything significant. I also do not see anything relevant in any OS log.
Could restart of some OS service help? So I do not need to restart the whole VM? Thank you very much for any ideas.