3 ms·

Oops I seem to have misread this comment... you did say "mirror". As for ECC, how often does corruption occur? 100% Data integrity is not hugely important for

by ericd 17y ago

Oops I seem to have misread this comment... you did say "mirror". As for ECC, how often does corruption occur? 100% Data integrity is not hugely important for the main app that will be sitting on this box, so a cosmic ray here or there isn't a big deal, but persistent unknown errors would be a problem.

lsc 17y ago
if the ram is good ahead of time, bit flips are pretty rare. I mean, not unheard of, but if you are storing a bunch of mpegs, or tweets or what have you, it doesn't matter that much. when your ram goes bad, you will have lots of random crashes (and at that point, boy howdy, any data that was written gets screwed royally. You are really best off loading from backup at that point, on a new box.) That is the other problem; because it's not 100% clear it's the ram (without ecc) it's easy for the service provider to push around 'half bad' modules without really fixing them. I know at all the big places I've worked, it was an incredible pain to get people to take a hardware problem seriously enough to get them to let me fix it, rather than just re-imaging the box and putting it back on the 'available box' queue.
- ericd 17y ago
  Hm yeah, promo prices on these makes me think they might have had a large "available queue" of these things... I'll kick the tires before I switch everything over. Know of any good memory tests? :-)
  - lsc 17y ago
    there is no substitute for memtest86. but without a KVM over IP (or flipping a bit in memtest86 and a serial console) that's pretty useless to you. At one point I had a set of patches to memtest86 that made screen scraping the pass/fail off a serial console much easier for one of the larger companies I worked for. But it'd be serverbeach that would need to implement that, and very few dedicated server providers give you serial consoles. I did at one point, but it doesn't look like it makes sense for me to host dedicated servers for less than super premium prices, and frankly, I don't feel like providing the level of support that would be expected with such pricing.

by ericd 17y ago

lsc 17y ago

if the ram is good ahead of time, bit flips are pretty rare. I mean, not unheard of, but if you are storing a bunch of mpegs, or tweets or what have you, it doesn't matter that much. when your ram goes bad, you will have lots of random crashes (and at that point, boy howdy, any data that was written gets screwed royally. You are really best off loading from backup at that point, on a new box.) That is the other problem; because it's not 100% clear it's the ram (without ecc) it's easy for the service provider to push around 'half bad' modules without really fixing them. I know at all the big places I've worked, it was an incredible pain to get people to take a hardware problem seriously enough to get them to let me fix it, rather than just re-imaging the box and putting it back on the 'available box' queue.

ericd 17y ago
Hm yeah, promo prices on these makes me think they might have had a large "available queue" of these things... I'll kick the tires before I switch everything over. Know of any good memory tests? :-)
- lsc 17y ago
  there is no substitute for memtest86. but without a KVM over IP (or flipping a bit in memtest86 and a serial console) that's pretty useless to you. At one point I had a set of patches to memtest86 that made screen scraping the pass/fail off a serial console much easier for one of the larger companies I worked for. But it'd be serverbeach that would need to implement that, and very few dedicated server providers give you serial consoles. I did at one point, but it doesn't look like it makes sense for me to host dedicated servers for less than super premium prices, and frankly, I don't feel like providing the level of support that would be expected with such pricing.