Hi All ,
Can you please help me out with the following questions .
Our application is running on Postgres 7.4.X . I agree that this is a very old version of Postgres and we should have upgraded . The issue that we faced is that
1 . There was a system crash due to a hardware failure .
2 . When the system came up , we tried to insert a few records into the database . However at this point in time we saw that Postgres was taking a lot of CPU & memory .
Around 42% CPU consumption . This was a cause of concern .
3 . We re-indexed the database and it helped reduce the cpu & memory consumption .
My question is
A ) Isn’t Postgres database resilient enough to handle hardware system failure ? or it sometime results in a corrupt index for its tables ? I read on the Postgres site that hardware failure can cause corrupt indexes . Besides this are there any other scenario which may result in such corruption .
B) If there has been improvement / enhancements done by Postgres regarding the way it handles corrupt indexes can you please pass me more information about the bug Id or some documentation on it ? Our application does not do any REINDEXING . I am in a dilemma if we should seriously incorporate it in our application .
I ideally want to push to a higher version of Postgres . If I can prove that there will be significant performance benefits and that crashes won’t occur then I will be able to present a strong case .
Since my question is related to Performance & Data corruption i saw on the Postgres site that i should provide the following information
Addition Info :
CPU manufacturer and model : Intel's Itanium Processor
Do you use a RAID controller? yes
PCIe SAS SmartArray P410i RAID Controller
PCIe SAS SmartArray P411 RAID Controller
Is is Write back caching enabled ?
Total Cache Size (MB)............... 144
Read Cache........................ N/A
Write Cache....................... N/A
No of disks : 4
Have you ever set fsync=off
in the postgresql config file?
#fsync = true # turns forced synchronization on or off
I never changed it .
Have you had any unexpected power loss lately? Replaced a failed RAID disk? Had an operating system crash? Yes system crashed had occured .
Hope this information helps .
Regards,
Sumeet