Re: Corruption (Was: Re: Why Not MySQL?)

On Wed, 3 May 2000, Vince Vielhaber wrote:

> On Tue, 2 May 2000, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> 
> > 
> > As Don asks, what happened with the v7.0 trials you were doing?  Corrupted
> > indices, I've seen occasionally in older versions, but I can't recall ever
> > seeing corrupt system tables ...
> > 
> > I don't have a GUI browser right, so searching the archives is kinda tough
> > for me :(  Can you refresh my memory for me?  There has to be something
> > logical to this, as to what the cause for the corruption is :(
> > 
> > >From Don's comment, I take it you are using FreeBSD?  Version?  Stability
> > of the machine?  Never crashes?
> > 
> > Version of PostgreSQL?  Compile/configure options?  Do you have any core
> > files in your data/base/* hierarchy that would be the result of a backend
> > crashing?  
> > 
> > I know you are looking at alternatives, but I'm terrible at letting go of
> > problems :(
> 
> His description of table corruption and the system running slower and
> slower sounds like a disk going bad.   I've seen it hundreds of times
> on news machines.  Constant retries while trying to write to the disk
> will give slowdowns.  Having data on a spot of the disk that's unreliable
> will certainly cause data integrity problems.  

That was one thing I was thinking ... the other was the possibility that
he's mount'd async and his machine is rebooting ... *or* he has memory
problems causing the shared memory to corrupt, dump the postmaster process
which is corrupting his tables ...


Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org 
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org