Hanging backends and possible index corruption - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

We are currently analyzing an issue at one of our customers PostgreSQL 
database.

The current version is 9.1.6 (update to 9.1.7 is scheduled for next monday, 
no downtime possible before). It runs on POWER7 (pSeries 740) on an RHEL6.3 
64-bit LPAR. The packages are built from PGDG SVN sources, no special 
tweaks added. We saw no hardware related errors on this machine, nor any 
crashes.

What currently happens on this machine are hanging statements (SELECTs and 
INSERTs occasionally) with 100% CPU. After some investigation it turned out 
that the corresponding backends are seeking within an index file over and 
over again in a loop. Looking into the hanging queries i've recognized 
certain keys which seems to have the problem, other keys used in the WHERE 
condition run smoothly. Turning off index and bitmap index scans caused the 
suspicious keys to return results, too.

So i've saved the index file (normal BTree index with a single bigint 
column), did a REINDEX and the problem was gone. Looking at the index file 
with pg_filedump and pgbtreecheck from Alvaro gave me the following output:

pgbtreecheck gives warnings about pages' parents and then loops visiting 
the same pages over and over again:

NOTICE: fast root: block 290 at level 2
NOTICE: setting page parents
WARNING: block 12709 already had a parent (8840); new parent is 12177
WARNING: block 12710 already had a parent (12439); new parent is 10835
NOTICE: done setting parents
NOTICE: Checking forward scan of level 0, starting at block 1

-- loop starts

WARNING: right sibling 12710 does not point left to me (11680); points to 
10924 instead

Looking into the relevant pages and their prev and next pointers give me 
the following:

pg_filedump -i -R 11680 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (12651)  Next (12710)  Level (0)  CycleId (0)

pg_filedump -i -R 10924 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (10923)  Next (12710)  Level (0)  CycleId (0)

pg_filedump -i -R 12710 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (10924)  Next (10925)  Level (0)  CycleId (0)

pg_filedump -i -R 10925 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (12710)  Next (10926)  Level (0)  CycleId (0)

pg_filedump -i -R 12709 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (8849)  Next (8850)  Level (0)  CycleId (0)

pg_filedump -i -R 8840 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (8555)  Next (9125)  Level (1)  CycleId (0)

pg_filedump -i -R 12439 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (11405)  Next (11690)  Level (1)  CycleId (0)

$ pg_filedump -i -R 12177 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (11690)  Next (0)  Level (1)  CycleId (0)

$ pg_filedump -i -R 10835 ~/tmp/100252789 | grep Blocks Blocks: Previous (10550)  Next (11120)  Level (1)  CycleId (0)

This symptom happened three times in the last couple of weeks now. Looking 
at the numbers doesn't give me the impression that some flaky hardware 
could be involved. What else can we do to track down this problem, any 
suggestions?

-- 
Thanks
Bernd