Re: Postgres "invalid page header"

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 06:07:05PM -0400, Carl Anderson wrote:
> >I am working with 7.4.1 under Linux (SuSE 8.1) The server is a HP ProLiant
> >DL 380-G3, 2x Intel Pentium4-Xeon, 2.8 GHz, 4 GB memory and a RAID 5
> >system with ca. 500 GB diskspace (xfs file system)
> >
> >
> >When doing big transactions or changes (UPDATE several million rows in one
> >step) on a database with ca. 50 GB diskspace and ca 15 million entries,
> >PostGIS and lots of indexes, I get errors like
> >
> >ERROR: invalid page header in block 582024 of relation ...
> >
> >The error does not occur regularly. It seems to me that the error is
> >related with heavy load and heavy I/O . CPU and memory does not seem the
> >problem, according to my hotsanic tools.

Hi

I believe that I had a similar problem - but since that database in question
was still running I thought it was releated to the 7.4.1 bug regarding the
wrong alignment information.

Our database is running on an 2x Xeon 2.66GHz, 2GB of RAM, and two 120GB
Drives (Seagate ST3120026AS) combined to a software-raid-1 volume (using the
md driver). Postgres has it's data on an XFS-Filesystem (74GB). We are using
kernel 2.6.6 with the "deadline" io-scheduler).

We daily load about 2-3 million rows into the database (in one big
transaction). The first problem
that appeared where crashing selects - the "Invalid page header"-problem
appeared when I tried to upgrade to 7.4.2, in the "analyze" step right after
fixing the wrong alignment info in the system table.

Since we couldn't repair the database (and more and more selects started to
crash), we dumped everything that was still dumpable, and reinitialized the
database. The new database is now running for about 1 1/2 weeks, and there
haven't been any problems until now.

So - maybe it's really an XFS problem... Which version of linux are you
running?

greetings, Florian Pflug