On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik.ramm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dear PostgreSQL community, > > I hope you can help me with a problem I'm having - I'm stuck and don't > know how to debug this further. > > I have a rather large nightly process that imports a lot of data from the > OpenStreetMap project into a PostGIS database, then proceeds doing all sorts > of things - creating spatial indexes, computing bounding boxes, doing > simplification of geometries, that kind of stuff. The whole job usually > takes about five hours. > > I'm running this on a Quad-Core Linux (Ubuntu, PostgreSQL 8.3) machine with > 8 GB RAM. > > Every other night, the process aborts with some strange error message, and > never at the same position: > > ERROR: invalid page header in block 166406 of relation "node_tags" > > ERROR: could not open segment 2 of relation 1663/24253056/24253895 (target > block 1421295656): No such file or directory > > ERROR: Unknown geometry type: 10 > > When I continue the process after the failure, it will usually work. > > I know you all think "hardware problem" now. Of course this was my first > guess as well. I ran a memory test for a night, no results; I downgraded do > "failsafe defaults" for all BIOS timings, again no change. Ran "cpuburn" and > all sorts of other things to grill the hardware - nothing. You definitely are suffering from db corruption, and given the number and differing type of errors, it would seem unlikely that pgsql has a load of bugs only you are seeing. OTOH, if the bug is hidden deep in postgis or something, then who knows... I'd definitely run something like bonnie++ for a few days and see if it gets HD errors or not. And definitely run memtest86 for a day or so and make sure you're not getting any errors there.
