Result of a discussion with @Habbie in IRC (and me misreading the
docs, as usual).
On a primary, this is the amount of seconds between the primary checking
the SOA serials in its database to determine to send out NOTIFYs to the
-secondaries. On secondaries, this is the number of seconds between the secondary
-checking for updates to zones.
+secondaries. On secondaries, this is the number of seconds between the
+check for zones where the REFRESH period has expired. For zones where
+that is the case, secondaries will request updates from the primary.
.. _setting-xfr-max-received-mbytes: