"Darren Reed" <darrenr+postgres@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > * pg_dump fails to run, causing an "out of memory" error (I don't > understand > why this happens, but it does); Let's see the exact command to pg_dump and the exact failure message. It might be useful to add -v so we can get some sense of where in the process it fails. > * restarting postgres across a reboot results in tables disappearing > without any error messages being given out (this is *really > disturbing*.) Hm, system reboot you mean? To be honest I think this is likely pilot error, along the lines of the postmaster you are running after the reboot is using a different data directory than the one you were talking to before. Comparing the output of "SHOW data_directory;" before and after might be illuminating. I remember a vaguely similar incident awhile back in which it turned out that the DBA had put the data directory on a soft-mounted NFS server, which sometimes hadn't come up by the time Postgres started, and so sometimes he got the NFS server's version of the database and sometimes he got a version that was on the local disk underneath the NFS mount point. *That* was a mess :-(, and that was one reason why the PGDG and Red Hat init scripts for PG no longer do an automatic initdb if they don't find a valid data directory where it's supposed to be. Exactly how are you starting the postmaster, anyway, and what is the underlying platform here? Did you roll-your-own Postgres build or is this a prepackaged distribution? If the latter, whose? While I'm asking questions, is it just the tables that disappear or is it all your database objects (including functions etc)? Do *all* your tables disappear or just some of them? What do you mean by "disappear" exactly --- do you get 'relation "foo" does not exist', or some weirder error, or are the tables present but empty? > "wc -l" of the output from the last successuful dump_all is around > 8million lines, spread across half a dozen or so tables. As already pointed out, this database is tiny. I'm not sure what your problem is, but I'm quite sure it's not "database is too big". > I'm currently using 8.1.3, will I fare any better with a more recent > version? You should certainly be on 8.1.10 just on general principles, though I don't immediately recall any bugs that seem like they could be related. There have been plenty of bugs fixed since 8.1.3 though. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
