You said "local Reiser FS." Maybe repeat on one of the others, Ext3/JFS?
Tom asked about hardware issues, is there nothing in syslog
that relates to the timing of the event? I don't recall you
responding in public to this. Maybe I missed it.
Just musing...
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 12:50:26PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Mr. Dan" <bitsandbytes88@hotmail.com> writes:
> >> How are you doing the copies, exactly? SQL COPY command, psql \copy,
> >> something else?
>
> > We've tried SQL COY and psql \copy and always get random results - 0,1, or 2
> > blocks of 25 rows missing.
>
> Hmph. If it happens with a SQL COPY command then psql seems to be off
> the hook, and that also eliminates some theories about dropped TCP
> packets and such.
>
> Would you check back in the source table for the COPY and see what the
> ctid values are for the missing rows? I'm wondering about a pattern
> like "the dropped rows of a group are all on the same disk page", ie,
> what's being missed is one whole page at a time.
>
> If that's what's happening, the only very plausible theory I can think
> of is that your disk drive is sometimes glitching and returning a page
> of all-zeroes instead of what it should return. Postgres will not
> complain about this in normal operation (because there are legitimate
> error-recovery scenarios where a zero page can be in a table); it'll
> just treat the page as empty. VACUUM will complain though, so the next
> step would be to set up a test table by copying your large table and
> then repeatedly run plain VACUUM on the test table. If you get sporadic
> warnings "relation foo page N is uninitialized --- fixing" then we have
> the smoking gun. Don't run this test directly on a valuable table, as
> each such message would mean you just lost another page of data :-(
>
> FWIW, I spent several hours yesterday evening copying 6GB tables around
> to see if I could reproduce any such problem, and I couldn't...
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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