Oddbean new post about | logout
 it's definitely not impossible that there's a bug in leveldb ! maybe it's possible to diagnose it if it keeps happening more or less consistently there

it's just that, data corruption messages tend to show as "error in leveldb" (because that's the thing causing most of i/o) and thus people are first to blame leveldb, it's such a common trope

i've investigated a few corrupted databases back in the day and every time it was a bitflip or some other issue more likely to be caused by hardware than software problems
while on reliable hardware it tends to be possible to run syncs back to back in a loop without trouble

the thing is, there are few workloads that put modern hardware to the test, and are also super-critical about every bit of correctness like a blockchain sync, so it makes sense you're not seeing problems with anything else

still, it could potentially be a bug that happens in very specific circumstances