Pages disappearing

[Andreas Bauer]

We're on 7.19.4 DataCenter and observe an alarming symptom:

Seemingly random pages (but apparently only those who have child pages) seem to disappear - while the children are still shown to be linked to the disappeared page (see attached image)!

Weird thing is: when I manually reorder pages and move the "disappeared" page around in the index tree, it starts to display its content again. So, that's a fix in a sense, but doesn't scale to my entire installation.

So, I already tried rebuilding the index via the UI, but to no avail. Health checks, log analysis, etc. all normal.

This is quite alarming. Any ideas what could cause this or what we could do?

[Andreas Bauer · Accepted solution]

I followed all the official online documentation to rebuild indexes, but to no avail. The pages kept disappearing.

Turns out though that wiping and then restoring my entire PostgreSQL database from an ASCII SQL-dump seems to have fixed the issue. During the restore process, I saw dozens if not hundreds of CREATE INDEX statements scrolling past the screen, and I assume this somehow fixed the broken database indexes (if that's what it was).

So, after the restore, all pages and artefacts that had previously vanished were back again.