Re: PANIC during VACUUM

German Becker wrote:
> I am testing version 9.1.9 before putting it in production. One of my tests involved deleting a the
> contents of a big table ( ~ 13 GB size) and then VACUUMing it. During VACUUM PANICS. Here is the
> message:
>
> PANIC:  corrupted item pointer: offset = 8128, size = 80
>
>
> I found the error a couple of times, allways during VACUUM after deleting the context of the same big
> table (after re-polpulating it of course).
>
> The error message is always *exactly* the same i.e. the same offset and size.
>
> When this happens the backend gets restarted and if I issue the same VACUUM command, I get the same
> error.
>
> I also tried triggering the backup server (hot-standby with streaming replication, and trying the
> VACUUM there (to see if it may be a hardware problem in the primary) and got the same issue.
>
> What might be causing this? Should I reported as a bug? Thanks!

If you mess with the database files, errors like this are to be expected.
The PANIC and restart is because the error happened during a sensitive phase.

This is not a bug.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe