Re: Can't connect (2 dbs) or login (2 others)

On 9/25/07, Morris Goldstein <morris(dot)x(dot)goldstein(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Thanks for your help with pg_resetxlog. It recovered all of our databases,
> and it looks like we got lucky in that no updates were lost.
>
> We are deciding on the goals for our next release, and one of the issues on
> the table is an upgrade to postgres 8. Can you comment on the improvements
> in performance and especially reliability over postgres 7.4? In particular,
> if the risk of pg_xlog corruption is lower, that would support the move to
> postgres 8 in a particularly effective way, while the pain of the recent
> episode is still vivid.

My experience has been that 7.4 was rock solid stable. But our uses
may not be similar to yours. I would question how you managed to get
your servers into this state. if one server out of four had this
problem I would have said to examine your system to see if it has bad
memory, CPU, or drive arrays.

But since it hit all of your machines, and at about the same time, I
tend to think that someone did something to these machines that caused
this issue, and it's not a 7.4.x problem.

Did you update / upgrade kernels, device drivers, hardware, etc...
What is common between all these systems besides postgresql? Was
there a power outage? All machines had the same admin one day who had
a brain cramp and did something stupid?

Simply put, we need more info on how this happened.