disk I/O error with SQLite

perl sqlite cgi dbi
kevinarpe picture kevinarpe · Apr 3, 2012 · Viewed 14.2k times · Source

I have a (tiny) dynamic website that is (roughly) a Perl CGI script using a SQLite database. Package DBI is the abstraction layer used in Perl.

About one week ago, I started to see this error message:

disk I/O error(10) at dbdimp.c line 271

Since this is a hosted site running Apache, I cannot see if the hard disk is (nearly) full. Access to command "df" is disabled.... but I used the (UNIX) shell command "yes > blah" to test the disk can still create new files. My database is very tiny -- less than 50 kilobytes.

I checked file and directory permissions: Directory and all parents are a+r,a+x (all + read/executable). The directory containing my SQLite database file is also a+w (all + write). The database file itself has a+w,a+r (all + read/write).

I wrote a simple Perl program to test I can run the failing select query: It runs fine.

I ran query "VACUUM" on the database. I tried my tests again -- no improvement.

I dumped the SQLite database to raw SQL (using SQLite shell command ".dump") and rebuilt. I tried my tests again -- no improvement.

Any suggestions? I am so confused... Normally, the above list can catch most programming/setup errors.

Answer

Alan Robertson picture Alan Robertson · Nov 13, 2018

Another cause for this:

  • Database file is writeable
  • Database journal file (ending in -journal) is not writable

When the database file isn't writable, you get a "readonly database" error. When it's writable, but the journal file is not, you get "I/O error" instead.

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