4 ms·
> "statistically speaking, most computers in the world do not use ECC". How can both of these things be true? ... most computers aren't particularly reliable.
by Freaky 11y ago
> "statistically speaking, most computers in the world do not use ECC". How can both of these things be true?
... most computers aren't particularly reliable.
I'm curious - are you not monitoring or at least keeping a vague eye on ECC correction events with your existing hardware? If so, are you just not seeing any?
I've never really operated at any sort of "large" scale - a handful of racks at most - but I've always found correction events to be about as routine as IO errors, and certainly way more common than outright disk failures.
- codinghorror 11y agoNeither of our (very good IMO) sysadmins bothered to check ECC counters on our existing server memory as far as I know. We did check SMART counters and SSD wear levels, though.. It is certainly a very good point that unusual numbers of ECC errors (corrected) are a bad sign and that machine should probably have its memory replaced at a minimum.
- Freaky 11y agoI.. would probably have done that before concluding I didn't have any need for it. Even just do a quick one-off mcelog run to see what events have happened recently - you don't have to do some big statistical analysis. I'd estimate about half the machines I've used with ECC have had at least one correction a year, maybe a quarter had one every few months. I've seen one-off weird bursts that never happen again, and I've had quite a few cases where ongoing corrections have indicated a DIMM needed reseating. An actual blatantly faulty DIMM's been quite rare.