3 ms·
> ECC memory...often considered necessary in a server environment This is very much workload-specific. If you cycle your processes out of memory even once a da
by duaneb 11y ago
> ECC memory...often considered necessary in a server environment
This is very much workload-specific. If you cycle your processes out of memory even once a day, the chances of seeing a random gamma ray burst is vanishingly small. Of course, I wouldn't host ZFS or a data store.
- wrigby 11y agoIn my experience, ECC shows benefits more often when a DIMM starts to fail, not in protecting us from cosmic rays (though I don't think I was able to make a note of the last cosmic ray that flew by me). I've had systems limp along reliably while throwing EDAC messages every few hours. With non-ECC memory, they would have crashed and burned. Of course, if you're seeing EDAC messages, you'd be better advised to just shut down the metal and shift your workload to a different machine until you can replace the DIMMs in question.
- GirlProgrammer 11y agoThe figures we see is about 1 bit-flip per gigabyte/year. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory) That's enough for us to use Xeons and ECC memory in all our production machines, and machines used to produce releases for customers, etc. It's just not worth the risk.
- ansible 11y agoYeah, I don't know that people are doing that on a regular basis. I also think you are underestimating the amount of cosmic ray events that occur on a regular basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Effect_on_electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Effect_on_electroni...