Re: corrupted item pointer:???

hubert depesz lubaczewski wrote:
> hi.
> basic information:
> machine: desktop computer, with sata hard drive, no bad blocks. 2g
> ram.AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2600+
> system: linux debian testing, using 2.6.11 kernel.
> postgresql: 8.1.3 compiled by hand using:
...
>
> version() -> PostgreSQL 8.1.3 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc
> (GCC) 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-13)

OK - nothing unusual there.

> on this machine i have copy of 40G database from production servers.
> i was testing migration to hstore (
> http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/hstore/README.hstore)
>
> at some point ot tests it failed saying corrupted item pointer.

> is there any way i can check what went wrong?
> i dont need to recover the data.
> i just need to know wherher the problem is hstore-related,
> hardware-related or just random thing happening because of nothing.

Hmm - I believe that means a data/index block was corrupted.

Have you seen any crashes, or hardware-related errors in your logs?

What are your config settings, particularly the first three here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/runtime-config-wal.html
fsync, wal_sync_method, full_page_writes

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd