Nick Triantos wrote:
Thanks. I've gotten very good at repairing the tables over the past couple of days :-/, but I'd still like to understand the root cause,
Basically, there are four possibilities: * Mistreatment of MySQL such as unexpected kill -9 or power cycling * Hardware problems (power, RAM, disk, CPU, etc) * Bug in MySQL * Bug in operating system
Upgrading to the current MySQL stable release is a good thing to try, which you've already done. I also *highly* recommend checking your server's RAM -- we had some terrible problems with bad hardware at Wikipedia.
One thing you should be sure to do is record what the actual error messages you're receiving are (don't forget to use the 'perror' command to get the error messages for the numeric error codes that MySQL spouts) and check the MySQL error log for anything of interest. If there's a MySQL bug, you'll want to document the problem so it can be reported and fixed.
In my experience the most likely table to be corrupted 'mysteriously' is the searchindex. This may just be because it's relatively large and has a complicated index which is slow to update and frequently being read, so has opportunity to get clobbered.
and especially if there are more mediawiki-specific tools to try to recover / export the data if I need it.
Not really, sorry. (When everything's working you can export most page data also with Special:Export, but the main workhorse for backup/restore is mysqldump.)
I enabled the debug log, and all I see that's suspicious is frequent abrupt exits from RawPage::view, line 59 of includes/RawPage.php. From looking at the code, it looks like perhaps that line of code shouldn't be in that function??
Should be harmless. This is for loading the customizable stylesheet bits; it skips out 'early' to avoid the later calls to all the HTML template layout.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)