Postgres "invalid page header"

Hubert,

I too have noticed such an issue

Would you be willing to try to load a large table (from a SQL file).
It reliably demonstrates the behavior "invalid page header"
after completion (for me)

It seems to me that while there are WAL logs being flushed, a certain
type of failed SQL insert will cause a page to be marked wrong.

C.

> Hi list,
>
> 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.
>
> I have worked through
>
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2003-11/msg01288.php
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2003-09/msg00423.php
> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=20030922162322.E12708%40quartz.newn.cam.ac.uk&rnum=8&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dpg_filedump%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D20030922162322.E12708%2540quartz.newn.cam.ac.uk%26rnum%3D8
>
>
> which suggest to me that I have run into hardware trouble (disk? memory?!) But I supposed that my server was not SO bad for this database application...
>
> How to fix that? (I mean - not to repair the tables or pages but to get a stable one? ) Trying another sotrage hardware?!
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr.-Ing. Hubert Fröhlich
> Bezirksfinanzdirektion München
> Alexandrastr. 3, D-80538 München, GERMANY
> Tel. :+49 (0)89 / 2190 - 2980
> Fax :+49 (0)89 / 2190 - 2997
> hubert dot froehlich at bvv dot bayern dot de
>

--
Carl Anderson
GIS Manager, Fulton County E&CD
404.730.8026
carl(dot)anderson(at)co(dot)fulton(dot)ga(dot)us