sergej.jurecko(a)gmail.com wrote: Thanks for the code and data, it shows the problem pretty clearly. Unfortunately the solution is less obvious at the moment, still working on it. The situation is this: deleting the record causes the leaf page to become too empty, so it gets merged with a neighboring page - this is no problem. The merge causes its parent branch page to also become too empty, so that is also merged with a neighboring branch page. This is where the problem arises: In a branch page, the key for slot 0 is always empty - it's never stored. So we have two branch pages, each with two nodes, and node 0 of each is essentially zero length. But when merging, we need to store a valid key. We go from page 1, slot 0; page 1, slot 1; and page 2, slot 0; page 2, slot 1 to page 1, slot 0, slot 1, slot 2, slot 3 In this case, we have to retrieve the key corresponding to page 2 slot 0 and store it in page 1 slot 2. In this DB this key is very large, and storing it leaves no room for the last key in slot 3. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/