One of my MongoDB dev database server had crashed due to abrupt power failure. I was running MongoDB 3.2.4 with WiredTiger storage engine. I had one user collection in my test database; and at the time of server crash, inserts were going on from a loop into this collection.
I started back the server; MongoDB did recovery from last checkpoint and it started fine.
2016-06-24T09:53:47.113+0530 W - [initandlisten] Detected unclean shutdown - /data/db/mongod.lock is not empty.
2016-06-24T09:53:47.113+0530 W STORAGE [initandlisten] Recovering data from the last clean checkpoint.
After the server had started, I tried to check the number of documents that got inserted into my users collection, so I run the db.collection.count() and seeing the result I was stunned.
> db.users.count()
7
> db.users.find({}).count()
7
Then I run db.collection.stats() that too also confirmed the previous results
This result was not correct, as previously I had 7 documents in the users collections (before the insert operation was started). At the time of crash as the insert operations were going on, so the number documents should have increased. So where the document from my new inserts had gone????? Immediately I felt the fear of data loss or corruption.
I run aggregate method with $group to check the number of docs and result was encouraging:
> db.users.aggregate({ $group: { _id: null, count: { $sum: 1 } } })
{ "_id" : null, "count" : 27662 }
My data was there, so the fear of data loss went away
. That means the issue was with the count() and stats() results.
Then I checked the MongoDB documents and I found that, if the MongoDB instance using WiredTiger storage engine had unclean shutdown, then the statistics on size and count may go wrong.
To restore and correct the statistics after an unclean shutdown, we should run the validate command or the helper method db.collection.validate() on each collection of the mongod.
Then I run the db.collection.validate() method on my users collections:
After that I run the count() method, it gave me correct results:
> db.users.count()
27662
Tip: Don’t always rely on count() or stats() methods, run aggregate() with $group to get the document count if you have any doubt. Also on sharded cluster, it is always better to run aggregate() with $group to get the count of documents.
I started back the server; MongoDB did recovery from last checkpoint and it started fine.
2016-06-24T09:53:47.113+0530 W - [initandlisten] Detected unclean shutdown - /data/db/mongod.lock is not empty.
2016-06-24T09:53:47.113+0530 W STORAGE [initandlisten] Recovering data from the last clean checkpoint.
After the server had started, I tried to check the number of documents that got inserted into my users collection, so I run the db.collection.count() and seeing the result I was stunned.
> db.users.count()
7
> db.users.find({}).count()
7
Then I run db.collection.stats() that too also confirmed the previous results
This result was not correct, as previously I had 7 documents in the users collections (before the insert operation was started). At the time of crash as the insert operations were going on, so the number documents should have increased. So where the document from my new inserts had gone????? Immediately I felt the fear of data loss or corruption.
I run aggregate method with $group to check the number of docs and result was encouraging:
> db.users.aggregate({ $group: { _id: null, count: { $sum: 1 } } })
{ "_id" : null, "count" : 27662 }
My data was there, so the fear of data loss went away
. That means the issue was with the count() and stats() results. Then I checked the MongoDB documents and I found that, if the MongoDB instance using WiredTiger storage engine had unclean shutdown, then the statistics on size and count may go wrong.
To restore and correct the statistics after an unclean shutdown, we should run the validate command or the helper method db.collection.validate() on each collection of the mongod.
Then I run the db.collection.validate() method on my users collections:
After that I run the count() method, it gave me correct results:
> db.users.count()
27662
Tip: Don’t always rely on count() or stats() methods, run aggregate() with $group to get the document count if you have any doubt. Also on sharded cluster, it is always better to run aggregate() with $group to get the count of documents.
