Hi all,
Our postgres instance on one of our production machines has recently been returning errors of the form "DatabaseError: invalid page header in block 1 of relation base/16384/76623" from normal queries. I've been reading that these are often linked to hardware errors, but I would like to better understand what else it could be or how to determine that for sure. I've filled out the standard issue reporting template below. Any feedback or troubleshooting instructions would be much appreciated.
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A description of what you are trying to achieve and what results you expect.:
Intermittent queries are failing with the error "DatabaseError: invalid page header in block 1 of relation base/16384/76623"
PostgreSQL version number you are running:
PostgreSQL 8.4.13 on x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 4.4.6 20120305 (Red Hat 4.4.6-4), 64-bit
How you installed PostgreSQL:
from standard package installer
Changes made to the settings in the postgresql.conf file:
name | current_setting | source
------------------------------+-----------------------------+----------------------
checkpoint_completion_target | 0.9 | configuration file
checkpoint_segments | 32 | configuration file
checkpoint_timeout | 15min | configuration file
DateStyle | ISO, MDY | configuration file
default_text_search_config | pg_catalog.english | configuration file
effective_cache_size | 1GB | configuration file
lc_messages | en_US.UTF-8 | configuration file
lc_monetary | en_US.UTF-8 | configuration file
lc_numeric | en_US.UTF-8 | configuration file
lc_time | en_US.UTF-8 | configuration file
log_checkpoints | on | configuration file
log_connections | off | configuration file
log_destination | csvlog | configuration file
log_directory | /opt/data/pgsql/data/pg_log | configuration file
log_disconnections | off | configuration file
log_duration | on | configuration file
log_filename | postgres-%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S | configuration file
log_lock_waits | on | configuration file
log_min_duration_statement | 250ms | configuration file
log_rotation_age | 1d | configuration file
log_rotation_size | 1GB | configuration file
log_temp_files | 0 | configuration file
log_timezone | Asia/Kolkata | command line
log_truncate_on_rotation | on | configuration file
logging_collector | on | configuration file
maintenance_work_mem | 768MB | configuration file
max_connections | 500 | configuration file
max_stack_depth | 2MB | environment variable
port | 5432 | command line
shared_buffers | 4GB | configuration file
ssl | on | configuration file
TimeZone | Asia/Kolkata | command line
timezone_abbreviations | Default | command line
wal_buffers | 16MB | configuration file
work_mem | 48MB | configuration file
Operating system and version:
RedHatEnterpriseServer, version 6.6
What program you're using to connect to PostgreSQL:
Python (django)
Is there anything relevant or unusual in the PostgreSQL server logs?:
I see lots of instances of this error (and similar). I'm not sure what else I should be looking for.
What you were doing when the error happened / how to cause the error:
I haven't explicitly tried to reproduce it, but it seems to consistently happen with certain queries. However, the system was rebooted shortly before the errors started occuring. The system was rebooted because another database (elasticsearch) was having problems on the same machine and the reboot was to attempt to resolve things.
DatabaseError: invalid page header in block 1 of relation base/16384/76623
(block and relation numbers change)
Unfortunately, I'm not completely familiar with the CPU and disk/RAID configurations used on the server. However it is storing to a (software) encrypted volume as mentioned above.
- Have you ever set
fsync=offin the postgresql config file?
No
- Have you had any unexpected power loss lately? Replaced a failed RAID disk? Had an operating system crash?
Not recently, though the system did reboot normally as described above.
- Have you run a file system check? (
chkdsk/fsck)
No.
- Are there any error messages in the system logs? (unix/linux:
dmesg,/var/log/syslog;
I haven't seen anything obvious but I wasn't sure what to look for.
thanks,
Cory
