Re: Fwd: Data corruption after restarting replica

On 16.2.2015 11:44, Novák, Petr wrote:
> Hello,
>
> sorry for posting to second list, but as I've received  no reply
> there, I'm trying my luck here.
>
> Thanks
> Petr
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Novák, Petr <novakp@avast.com>
> Date: Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 12:49 PM
> Subject: Data corruption after restarting replica
> To: pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> we're experiencing data corruption after switching streamed replica
> to primary.This is not the first time I've encountered this issue,
> so I'l try to describe it in more detail.
>
> For this particular cluster we have 6 servers in two datacenters (3
> in each). There are two instances running on each server, each with
> its own port and datadir. On the first two servers in each datacenter
> one instance is primary and the other is replica for the primary from
> the other server. Third server holds two offsite replicas from the
> other datacenter (for DR purposes)

So essentially you have three servers in each datacenter, configured
like this:

server A
--------
instance A1 (primary)
instance A2 (standby for B1)

server B
--------
instance B1 (primary)
instance B2 (standby for B2)

server C (in the other datacenter)
----------------------------------
instance C1 (standby for A1)
instance C2 (standby for B1)

So if A or B fails, you can swich to the other machine to the replica in
th same datacenter, and if the whole datacenter fails then you have C in
the other one.

Correct?

> Each replica was set up by taking pg_basebackup from primary
> (pg_basebackup -h <hostname> -p 5430 -D /data2/basebackup -P -v -U
> <user> -x -c fast). Then directories from initdb were replaced with
> the ones from basebackup (only the configuration files remained) and
> the replica started and was successfully connected to primary. It
> was running with no problem keeping up with the primary. We were
> experiencing some connection problem between the two datacenters,
> but replication didn't break.

OK, that sounds about right. How long was the replication running before
the failover? Have you tried running some queries on the standby?

BTW are you running async or sync replication (I guess async)?

> Then we needed to take one datacenter offline due to hardware
> maintenance. So I've switched the applications down, verified that
> no more clients were connected to primary, then shut the primary down
> and restarted replica without recovery.conf and the application were
> started using the new db with no problem. Other replica even
> successfully reconnected to this new primary.

Other replica? If I understand your deployment right, and you've
switched to the other datacenter, all the related replicas (original
master + first standby) were in the other datacetenter (now offline). So
what replica reconnected to the newly promoted primary?

Restart after removing recovery.conf is a bit cumbersome because of the
restart (pg_ctl promote does not need that IIRC), but it's a legal way
to do the promote.

> Few hours from the switch lines appeared in the server log (which
> didn't appear before), indicating a corruption:
>
> ERROR: index "account_username_key" contains unexpected zero page at
> block 1112135 ERROR: right sibling's left-link doesn't match: block
> 476354 links to 1062443 instead of expected 250322 in index
> "account_pkey"
>
> ..and many more reporting corruption in several other indexes.
>
> The issue was resolved by creating new indexes and dropping the
> affected ones, although there were already some duplicities in the
> data, that has to be resolved, as some of the indexes were unique.

So the machine was running for a few hours just fine, and then something
happened and these errors started occuring?

Can you check whether the table was vacuumed recently (before the errors
started to appear) or what else interesting happened?

> This particular case uses Postgres 9.1.14 on both primary and
> replica. But I've experienced similar behavior on 9.2.9. OS Centos
> 6.6 in all cases. This may mean, that there can be something wrong
> with our configuration or the replication setup steps, but I've set
> up another instance using the same steps with no problem.

How different are the systems? I see you're running 6.6 on both ends,
but maybe there's some tiny difference? One common issue we see from
time to time are minor locale differences, affecting the indexes.

> Fsync related setting are at their defaults. Data directories are on
> RAID10 arrays, with BBUs. Filesystem is ext4 mounted with nobarrier
> option.

Good ;-)

> Database is fairly large ~120GB with several 50mil+ tables, lots of
> indexes and FK constraints. It is mostly queried,
> updates/inserts/deletes are only several rows/s.

So it was queried for a few hours? Any idea if it was using the indexes,
or if it was choosing different execution plans?

--
Tomas Vondra                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services