Re: database corruption

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Guerin" <guerin@rentec.com>
To: <pgsql-novice@postgresql.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 12:33 PM
Subject: Re: [NOVICE] database corruption


> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
> >On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 14:16, Michael Guerin wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Hi,
> >>
> >>    We recently switch over from Solaris to Linux and we've been
> >>experiencing a couple database corruptions problems.  We're using the
> >>2.6 kernel and a XFS file system, in case there are any known problems
> >>with this setup.
> >>
> >>It's my understanding that these errors are typically b/c of hardware
> >>problems, so we're in the process of checking the disk.  However, are
> >>there other things that I should look to find out what's going on?   The
> >>table that was corrupted earlier this week was dropped and  recreated,
> >>but it was corrupted again sometime last night.  The table is pretty
> >>active, about 10GB are inserted and deleted every day.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Be sure and test your memory too.  And if you have a hardware RAID
> >controller, sometimes they can be slightly broken and cause random
> >corruption.
> >
> >
> >
> Switching from XFS to Reiserfs seems to have resolved our problems.
>

That sounds like a problem we had - we were running off an XFS partition,
had table corruption trouble (invalid page headers) on  a large table.  We
were running kernel 2.6, AMD64 architecture.  After the problem occurred a
couple times we upgraded our raid controller firmware and driver, checked
our RAM, and switched over to the JFS file system.  Haven't had trouble
since.  We tried a couple things when fixing our problem; but I'm wondering
if anyone else is having trouble with XFS, and that that might be the root
cause of the trouble.

-Adam