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