From: "Rob Mueller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 10:48:20 +1100
> It's scarier when you see this on the mailboxes DB. > > You've had this problem on your mailboxes db? Yuck. Yes, after system crashes. I think it was a SCSI card/driver problem. Hmm. Well, this is not as surprising. The intention is that the skiplist format is suppose to have ACID properties when used with stable storage, I decided when I was designing it to simplify the format in many cases by reducing it's resilience to byzantine failures. [Sidebar: skiplist makes an assumption that a single byte write might be in an interdeterminate state after a crash, that write will not affect nearby data that is already known to be on stable storage. On reflection I suspect the loop-forever problem could be caused by a "normal" failure, and in such a case the "truncate file" option is actually the right thing to do.] But since we've seen this problem on hardware we believe to be good (and that didn't even suffer an unexpected shutdown) it's my belief that there is a bug lurking out there. I just don't know what it is. Larry