Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2022-03-25 01:38:45 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> AFAICS, this strategy of whacking a predetermined chunk of the page with
>> a predetermined value is going to fail 1-out-of-64K times.
> Yea. I suspect that the way the modifications and checksumming are done are
> actually higher chance than 1/64k. But even it actually is 1/64k, it's not
> great to wait for (#animals * #catalog-changes) to approach a decent
> percentage of 1/64k.
Exactly.
> I'm was curious whether there have been similar issues in the past. Querying
> the buildfarm logs suggests not, at least not in the pg_checksums test.
That test has only been there since 2018 (b34e84f16). We've probably
accumulated a couple hundred initial-catalog-contents changes since
then, so maybe this failure arrived right on schedule :-(.
> We really ought to find a way to get to wider checksums :/
That'll just reduce the probability of failure, not eliminate it.
regards, tom lane