pg_dump: lost synchronization with server: got message type "5", length 842281016
The error does not occur always and not always with the same table.
Oh, that's even more interesting. Is the failure message itself consistent --- that is, is it always complaining about "message type 5" and the same bizarre length value? The "length" looks like it's really ASCII text ("2408" to be specific), so somehow libpq is misinterpreting a piece of the COPY datastream as the start of a new message.
The failure looks similarly but the number do not exactly the same:
pg_dump: lost synchronization with server: got message type "4", length 858863113
pg_dump: SQL command to dump the contents of table "aggr_max_hour" failed: PQendcopy() failed.
pg_dump: Error message from server: lost synchronization with server: got message type "4", length 858863113
pg_dump: The command was: COPY messungen.aggr_max_hour (id, von, wert, counts) TO stdout;
Well, I never used a packet sniffer but if anyone tells me what to capture, I'd be glad to.
However, the error occurs only on that kind of aggregation tables. There is a cron-job keeping the tables up to date, starting all 10 minutes. The job does delete and inserts on the table. Could this somehow block the dump process? Normally it should not?
It's hard to see how another backend would have anything to do with this, unless perhaps the error is dependent on a particular data value that is sometimes present in the table and sometimes not. It looks to me like either libpq or the backend is miscounting the number of data bytes in the COPY datastream. Would it be possible for you to use a packet sniffer to capture the communication between pg_dump and the backend? If we could look at exactly what's going over the wire, it would help to pin down the blame.
PostgreSQL is really a great piece of software, keep on making it even better!
Stefan
-- ----------------------------- Dr. Stefan Holzheu Tel.: 0921/55-5720 Fax.: 0921/55-5799 BITOeK Wiss. Sekretariat Universitaet Bayreuth D-95440 Bayreuth -----------------------------
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