5 ms·
What kind of web developer needs to care about cosmic rays and bit flips? Genuinely curious here.
by Cyph0n 10y ago
What kind of web developer needs to care about cosmic rays and bit flips? Genuinely curious here.
- posterboy 10y agoat least those like NASA who use space-grade (radiation hardened?) microchips
- Cyph0n 10y agoThat's not what I'm talking about at all. My issue is that the original commenter listed "resistance" to bit errors as an advantage to using Elixir vs. other languages for web dev. The question then becomes: who the hell needs bit flip resistance when building a web app?
- angersock 10y agoAny web developer whose software runs on computer hardware. Otherwise, you should be fine.
- Cyph0n 10y agoI still don't see why the parent commenter decided to include recovery from cosmic rays as an upside to using Elixir. I'm sure web devs everywhere are throwing out their current tools for this huge advantage! In any case, commodity server hardware already takes care of SEUs through ECC memory.
- nkurz 10y agoMemory corruption from cosmic rays may be more common than your intuition suggests. This article cites a 2009 study of a large cluster that found single-bit ECC corrections occurring about 1 per minute per TB, and uncorrectable double-bit errors at a rate of about 1 per year per TB: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-supercomputer-dirty-power-cosmic-rays-and-bad-solder http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-su.... Whether this is frequent enough to warrant consideration depends on your application, but there are definitely people here who care enough about how their systems recover after errors of this sort that it's not an absurd suggestion.
- gamache 10y agoI use cosmic rays as an example of "errors outside the programmer's control", that's all. My point is that those errors will always exist, and it's desirable to have a backup plan ready.