Re: missing chunk number 0 for toast value

"BJ Taylor" <btaylor@propertysolutions.com> writes:
> We are using version 8.3.1.  And to be precise, when I started the vacuum
> (analyze), I started it as a cron job to run daily around midnight.  The
> next day I came in and checked on it and it was still running.  Not thinking
> that it would take more than a full 24 hours to run, I let it be, and the
> next day I came in and the server started acting weird.  I believe the
> vacuum process continued to run, and a second vacuum process was started.
> The server became unstable, and refused incoming connections.

Unstable how?  What error did you get on the refused connections?  What
was showing up in the postmaster log?

> At which
> point, I killed all vacuum processes, and restarted postgresql.

How did you do that killing exactly?

> I believe
> it was somewhere during this process that the database became corrupted.  I
> am not certain what happens when two vacuum processes run at the same time.

Nothing of interest, it's done all the time.

> That may have been the problem, or it may not have.  Or it may have been
> that I killed the vacuum process in the middle of what it was doing.  One
> way or another, the problem that we have now, is that we are unable to get a
> dump of the database for backups, and the database seems less stable than it
> was previously (dropping connections, and refusing connections seemingly at
> random).

Again, what errors are you getting exactly, and what shows up in the
postmaster log?

            regards, tom lane