Re: Crash in postgres/linux on verly large database

On Tuesday 06 April 2004 12:22, Bernhard Ankenbrand wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we have a table width about 60.000.000 entrys and about 4GB storage size.
> When creating an index on this table the whole linux box freezes and the
> reiser-fs file system is corrupted on not recoverable.
>
> Does anybody have experience with this amount of data in postgres 7.4.2?
> Is there a limit anywhere?

Plenty of people with more data than that. It should be impossible for an
application to corrupt a file-system in any case. The two things to look at
would be your hardware or perhaps reiser-fs itself. I have heard about
problems with SMP machines locking up (some unusual glitch in some versions
of Linux kernel IIRC).

You might be able to see what is going wrong with careful use of vmstat and
strace -p <pid>. Start to create your index, find the pid of the backend
doing so and strace it. See if anything interesting comes out of it.

HTH, and stick around - someone else might have better advice.
--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd