On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Jim C. Nasby wrote:

ERROR:  cache lookup failed for relation 1906465919

It is on an exact table name.  When we retry the describe on a failure,
sometimes it works and sometimes it fails again.  When it fails again
the relation number is different. Also, \d schema.table always returns
quickly and never errors. \d table is slow and produces the error fairly
often.

They're using 8.0.x; I'm pretty certain it's 8.0.3.

We have the exact same problem on a 7.4.5 database. Some basic info on the database: psql's \d returns 424 rows, and the on-disk size of the database is about 11 GB. A standalone \dt throws the same occasional error.

I've suspected that it may be caused by ongoing periodic (at least once an hour) rebuilding of certain generated tables with TRUNCATE and then INSERT INTO the_table SELECT ... inside a transaction. But I don't have any proof of that; it's just the most obvious different thing going on compared to other databases we have.

It does seem like I've encountered the error less often since increasing the max_fsm_pages setting and thus had more effective VACUUM and less pg_class bloat, but OTOH I trained myself not to do \d there very often either, since it was so slow and failed so often, so that may be coincidence. :)

Jon

--
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
http://www.endpoint.com/
Software development with Interchange, Perl, PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux, ...

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