Re: Indexes getting corrupted.

Tom Lane wrote:
>>I'm suspicious of a more subtle intermittent error.
>
> Yeah, I am too, but so far none of the reporters have been cooperative
> about providing more information :-(

Well, at least from me, I can tell you I gave all information I came up
with. One thing that I pointed out is this (Windows 2000):

When you shutdown the machine just after you run my customized
installation procedure and you check the log after rebooting, you will
notice that only the first message (saying that a fast shutdown request
was received) will be in the log. The other messages that mention the
shutdown process completed succesfully do not appear. If I check the
database, the indexes *WILL* be corrupt.

I solved it by automatically stopping the server after the installation
precedure concludes. This solves this problem and, even after rebooting,
the indexes seems to be ok.

> I think the proposed patch is a waste of time. What I am hoping to get
> from people is a dump of the whole first page of the corrupted index
> (via pg_filedump, or even good ol' od). That might give us some idea of
> what we are dealing with --- localized corruption in a basically good
> metapage, or wholesale replacement of the page with some other page (and
> if so what), or maybe it is a hardware fault after all. You can't draw
> those sorts of conclusions from one or two words, but with a whole page
> to look at you have a shot at telling the difference.

I can try to revert my changes to get the problem to happen again. Just
tell me what exactly you need me to do. Also, this problem happened on
*SEVERAL* machines with different configurations. Actually, it happened
with all machines I tried and the "fix" I implemented (as mentioned
above) worked on all of them too.

-Bruno

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