Dear Tom, I tried another load of the databases with fsync off (-F to the postmaster), and I encountered at least one invalid page header. Is there code in Postgres that handles the buffer cache differently if fsync is off? Could this be a timing issue, since -F does make PostgreSQL run faster? BTW, I'll be out of the office for two weeks, so you'll hear back from me around Labor Day. Thanks. --Bob
Tom Lane writes: > > > "Robert E. Bruccoleri" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Besides a no optimization compilation of 7.4.3, what else > > would you recommend to explore this problem further? Thanks. --Bob > > I really haven't the foggiest where to look :-( I don't actually > believe that it's a spinlock problem; that would explain pages getting > substituted for other pages, in whole or in part, but you showed at > least one example where a page was just overwritten with garbage. > That looks more like a memory-stomp problem (again, assuming that it's > software) and so could be anywhere. > > Are you using any off-the-beaten-track code (contrib modules, > non-btree indexes, non-mainstream data types)? That stuff is less > well debugged than the mainstream ... > > regards, tom lane > +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+ | Robert E. Bruccoleri, Ph.D. | email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | President, Congenair LLC | URL: http://www.congen.com/~bruc | | P.O. Box 314 | Phone: 609 818 7251 | | Pennington, NJ 08534 | | +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster