Re: error: could not find pg_class tuple for index 2662

daveg <daveg(at)sonic(dot)net> writes:
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 07:45:01PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> Ah, OK, sorry. Well, in 9.0, VACUUM FULL is basically CLUSTER, which
>> means that a REINDEX is happening as part of the same operation. In
>> 9.0, there's no point in doing VACUUM FULL immediately followed by
>> REINDEX. My guess is that this is happening either right around the
>> time the VACUUM FULL commits or right around the time the REINDEX
>> commits. It'd be helpful to know which, if you can figure it out.

> I'll update my vacuum script to skip reindexes after vacuum full for 9.0
> servers and see if that makes the problem go away.

The thing that was bizarre about the one instance in the buildfarm was
that the error was persistent, ie, once a session had failed all its
subsequent attempts to access pg_class failed too. I gather from Dave's
description that it's working that way for him too. I can think of ways
that there might be a transient race condition against a REINDEX, but
it's very unclear why the failure would persist across multiple
attempts. The best idea I can come up with is that the session has
somehow cached a wrong commit status for the reindexing transaction,
causing it to believe that both old and new copies of the index's
pg_class row are dead ... but how could that happen? The underlying
state in the catalog is not wrong, because no concurrent sessions are
upset (at least not in the buildfarm case ... Dave, do you see more than
one session doing this at a time?).

regards, tom lane