"Philip Poles" <philip@surfen.com> writes:
> I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I've seen similar errors occur
> when there are too many open files on the filesystem (running Linux RH
> 6.2). I'm not sure if this problem is in the backend or the Linux
> kernal, or somewhere else, not being very conversant in such matters
> myself, but I did have our admin increase the limit for number of open
> files.
Good point. If you are at the system limit on number of open files,
blind writes would fail where regular writes do not (in 7.0.* and
earlier --- this is fixed for 7.1). However, if your kernel file
table is full, the symptoms are usually visible all over the place
not just in Postgres, so I'm not sure that this explains Steven's
problem.
I would recommend to Steven that he update to 7.0.2 soon, since there
is some additional debugging logic in 7.0.2 that logs the kernel error
code when a blind write fails --- that would give us some more info
about the underlying problem. Of course an update implies a postmaster
restart which will make the problem go away, so unless he knows how to
reproduce it I'd prefer to investigate first...
regards, tom lane