svn: bdb: PANIC / Reliability?

Good morning,

I switched over from CVS to SVN 1.1.4 about a month ago and have been
accessing my repository using file:/// and svn+ssh:// as one of a group of
two people that have write access. No fancy stuff, imho. While my last commit
before this weekend went in without trouble, now my repository seems to be
corrupt.

Actually, I already recovered once this Saturday using a procedure I found
online (sorry, no URL) that included rm __db.00*, rm log.000000001*,
db_recover -cv in the db directory. Things worked fine after that and I was
able to commit and update. I do have a backup from that time, so my data is
safe and I'm not in trouble. However, I DO worry about the reliability of SVN
because this morning I got the following errors (and I don't think my first
recovery attempt was flawed, because things were working fine just
afterwards):

$svn up
svn: Berkeley DB error while checkpointing after Berkeley DB transaction for
filesystem /home/bude/wittenbu/svn/db:
Invalid argument
svn: bdb: DB_ENV->log_flush: LSN of 19/323156 past current end-of-log of
1/38823
svn: bdb: Database environment corrupt; the wrong log files may have been
removed or incompatible database files imported from another environment
svn: bdb: representations: unable to flush page: 0
svn: bdb: txn_checkpoint: failed to flush the buffer cache Invalid argument

$ svnadmin recover .
Repository lock acquired.
Please wait; recovering the repository may take some time...
svn: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
svn: bdb: Log sequence error: page LSN 1 7802; previous LSN 19 316241
svn: bdb: Recovery function for LSN 1 7802 failed on forward pass
svn: bdb: PANIC: Invalid argument
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery

Usually I wouldn't mind helping the developers to iron this out, except for
the fact the I'm currently writing my master thesis and from an users
perspective just need a SCM system that is ROCK SOLID!

I'm sorry to say that SVN just doesn't seem to be there yet. Further, the
entry in the FAQ about DB_RUNRECOVERY isn't particularly encouraging, as it
tells me that my data not only gets corrupted by processes crashing but also
by incorrect permissions. I'm sorry for the people who put a lot of effort
into SVN, but my perception is that this is somewhat too fragile for
production use, or rather at least for me.

Now, I fixed my repository AGAIN by repeating the three steps pointed out
above. However, I'm getting quite close to switching back to CVS because from
my perspective as an user, this trouble is just not worth it.

While I guess that this mailing list gets a lot of noise about these kind of
problems (Google gives me 318 hits for the first part of the subject of this
mail), I'd appreciate if you could share some insight, particularly whether
my problems are just unique events that'll never happen to anyone and I was
just being unlucky, or whether I'd just have to expect these kind of problems
when using SVN. If there's interest, I've also tarballs of the corrupted and
fixed repositories.

Thanks,
   Georg

-- 
Georg Wittenburg
http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~wittenbu/