Re: page corruption on 8.3+ that makes it to standby

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> (1) You're assuming that the page will be zeroes on the slave without
> having forced it to be so.  A really obvious case where this fails
> is where we're doing crash-and-restart on the master: a later action
> could have modified the page away from the all-zero state.  (In
> principle that's OK but I think this might break torn-page protection.)

Hmm, yeah, that does seem like it has the potential to be bad. I
think this is sufficient reason to go with fix #1.

> (2) On filesystems that support holes, the page will not have storage,
> whereas it (probably) does on the master.  This could lead to a
> divergence in behavior later, ie slave runs out of disk space at a
> different point than the master.

I can't get excited about this one.

> (3) The position of the nominal EOF can drive choices about which page
> to put new tuples in, specifically thats where RelationGetBufferForTuple
> will go if FSM has no information.  This could result in unexpected
> divergence in behavior after the slave goes live compared to what the
> master would have done.  Maybe that's OK but it seems better to avoid
> it if we can, especially when you think about crash-and-restart on the
> master as opposed to a separate slave.

You're still going to have that in the "normal" (not altering the
tablespace) extension case, which is presumably far more common.

--
Robert Haas
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