Re: Uninitialized pages notices - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Uninitialized pages notices
Date
Msg-id 3404.1036741462@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Uninitialized pages notices  (Timothy D McKernan <tdm4@dyrectmedia.com>)
List pgsql-admin
Timothy D McKernan <tdm4@dyrectmedia.com> writes:
> Nov  6 04:17:09 dolidb-n1 logger: NOTICE:  Rel pg_type: Uninitialized
> page 6 - fixing

> I'd like to know what this means to our system - what causes an
> uninitialized page?  What could cause it to be so infrequent?

"Uninitialized" means "page contains zeroes" (or at least a few critical
page-header fields contain zeroes, which they should never do).  Usually
I take this as an indication of hardware problems.  But:

> Here are our system details:
> postgre: 7.2.3 (~4GB in size)
> os: Redhat 7.1sbe (Seawolf)
> kernel: 2.4.9-12smp
> ram: ~1GB ECC

SMP?  Are you actually using SMP hardware?  I seem to recall that the
2.4 Linux kernels weren't stable on SMP machines till 2.4.15 or
thereabouts.  In any case, RedHat 7.1 is pretty long in the tooth.
Perhaps an OS update would make life better.

            regards, tom lane

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