Re: rebellious postgres process

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> "Scott Marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Laszlo Nagy <gandalf(at)shopzeus(dot)com> wrote:
>>> The server was rebooting intermittently, so we replaced the RAM (we got a
>>> kernel page fault). But it was a week ago. The server is now stable. But is
>>> it possible that somehow the file system became inconsistent, and that is
>>> causing an infinite loop in the stats collector? Just guessing.
>
>> Yes, you really can't trust any data that was written to the drives
>> while the bad memory was in place.
>
> Still, it's quite unclear how bad data read from the stats file could
> have led to an infinite loop. The stats file format is pretty "flat"
> and AFAICS the worst effect of undetected corruption would be to have
> wrong count values for some tables/databases.

True. Is it possible some other bit of the data in the system was
corrupted and freaking out the stats collector?