Re: Corruption of files in PostgreSQL

Paolo Bizzarri wrote:
> On 6/2/07, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> "Paolo Bizzarri" <pibizza@gmail.com> writes:
>> > On 6/2/07, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> >> Please provide a reproducible test case ...
>>
>> > as explained above, the problem seems quite random. So I need to
>> > understand what we have to check.
>>
>> In this context "reproducible" means that the failure happens
>> eventually.  I don't care if the test program only fails once in
>> thousands of tries --- I just want a complete self-contained example
>> that produces a failure.
>
> As said above, our application is rather complex and involves several
> different pieces of software, including Zope, OpenOffice both as
> server and client, and PostgreSQL. We are absolutely NOT sure that the
> problem is inside PostgreSQL.
>
> What we are trying to understand is, first and foremost, if there are
> known cases under which PostgreSQL can truncate a file.

I would suspect either your hardware (RAID controller, hard drive, cache
etc) or your OS (kernel bug, file system bug, etc)

For instance:

http://lwn.net/Articles/215868/

documents a bug in the 2.6 linux kernel that can result in corrupted
files if there are a lot of processes accessing it at once.