Tuning for warm standby

[Kevin Kempter <kevin(at)kevinkempterllc(dot)com>]

Hi All;

I'm preparing to fire up WAL archiving on 8 production servers We will follow 
up with implementing a warm standby scenariio.

Does anyone have any thoughts per how to maximize performance, yet minimize 
the potential for data loss assuming we were not able to retrieve the final 
un-archived WAL segment from the original pg_xlog dir in the case of a crash?

Specifically, I wonder if there are some general rules of thought per tuning  
wal_buffers,  checkpoint_segments and friends...

Currently all servers have the following settings:
wal_buffers = 24
checkpoint_segments = 32


Thanks in advance

/Kevin