I've also seen the non-recovery -- On my systems, it also sent slapd into a mode where it was eating up the CPU, memory, and swap (I've filed an ITS on that). Do you see this over time? It took a little while for it to really ramp up.
More info on the setup is required in assessing the case. Looks like this setup is larger than what I experimented with. Was this observed only with the refreshAndPersist mode ? - Jong
--Quanah
-- Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Developer ITSS/TSS/Computing Systems Stanford University GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html