4 ms·

Oh, what's your use-case for ECC ram?

by jadbox 9y ago

ihsw2 9y ago
I'm not the parent commenter but it's probably finance or CAD modeling, environments where soft bit-errors (ones that silently and unpredictably cause data corruption rather than hard-crashes that are reproducible) can lead to nightmares.
- usefulcat 9y ago
  Or could be using ZFS
  - loeg 9y ago
    "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem." - Matt Ahrens[0] [0]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=26303271#p26303271 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...
    - godzillabrennus 9y ago
      Except there is: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/ https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-...
      - scineram 9y ago
        There is not.
    - usefulcat 9y ago
      I didn't say it was required. It's not uncommon for people to want to use ZFS specifically because they highly value data integrity. If that's the case, then it probably makes sense to use ECC.
vbezhenar 9y ago
The good question would be what's use-case for non-ECC RAM. I wouldn't want unreliably hardware for any task, even as simple as gaming. It's a shame that ECC ram available only for enthusiasts and with unnecessary premium. ECC really should be baseline. Computers meant to be reliable.
- srcmap 9y ago
  Is there any windows / linux utility that shows the number of ECC errors corrected since the boot? If not, AMD should write and promote one. Very curious on how often it happened for normal home/offic usage. I used to work for a silicon company who took a embedded network switch system with ECC logic to some nuclear lab for testing to verify/showcase the ECC functionalities.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    Even if you never personally encounter an error, knowing that the 1 bit correct and 1+ bit likely detect exists will save you in terms of piece of mind and trouble-shooting other issues. Plus, if you're scrubbing your storage the last thing you want is a memory error killing your data.
  - planteen 9y ago
    In Linux, yes, there is a service called mcelog and a utility from the edac-utils package called edac-util. You will see correctable ECC errors on systems. How frequent honestly seems to depend on the workload and the system itself. My suspicion is that often they are caused by poor PCB layout and ECC saves you. I spent literally weeks (nights, weekends) chasing down an issue I thought was a software bug but turned out a board layout issue on an embedded system. If the system had ECC, the error would have either been corrected or we would have gotten the uncorrectable ECC error trap. Since then, every workstation/server/desktop I spec is ECC. I wish more laptops had it.
    - srcmap 9y ago
      Thanks, Try the edac-util on 5 of 30+ or so servers. "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v3 @ 3.20GHz" with 128G RAM each. edac-util: No errors to report. System uptime ~30+ days. We recently have to move those servers. I wish I check this command before the move. The uptime should be 600 days + for some of the servers.
simcop2387 9y ago
In my case I've got a large amount of ram (128GB) and run many virtual machines for various purposes, along with that I've got 24TB of drives hooked up with ZFS running to back up those virtual machines, family photos and movies, etc. Being able to know that an error has happened and it's been corrected or handled appropriately (even killing the system and needing a reboot is appropriate) so that data isn't destroyed is a good thing for me.
koffiezet 9y ago
We just set up a Kubernetes cluster for building C++ and Java software. Thing is - you want to be absolutely sure that the software you software is built correctly and don't have any bit-flips ending up in your final builds, so ECC is an absolute must. Threadripper supporting this allowed us to create that cluster with cheap commodity hardware and made self-hosting the build-farm the clear financial winner, especially since we have tons of free rack-space (came with the building that was bought), already host servers locally - which means a lot support infrastructure is already in place, and have a solar surplus throughout the year in this building.

Oh, what's your use-case for ECC ram?

by jadbox 9y ago

Oh, what's your use-case for ECC ram?

I'm not the parent commenter but it's probably finance or CAD modeling, environments where soft bit-errors (ones that silently and unpredictably cause data corruption rather than hard-crashes that are reproducible) can lead to nightmares.

usefulcat 9y ago
Or could be using ZFS
- loeg 9y ago
  "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem." - Matt Ahrens[0] [0]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=26303271#p26303271 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...
  - godzillabrennus 9y ago
    Except there is: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/ https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-...
    - scineram 9y ago
      There is not.
  - usefulcat 9y ago
    I didn't say it was required. It's not uncommon for people to want to use ZFS specifically because they highly value data integrity. If that's the case, then it probably makes sense to use ECC.

vbezhenar 9y ago

The good question would be what's use-case for non-ECC RAM. I wouldn't want unreliably hardware for any task, even as simple as gaming. It's a shame that ECC ram available only for enthusiasts and with unnecessary premium. ECC really should be baseline. Computers meant to be reliable.

srcmap 9y ago
Is there any windows / linux utility that shows the number of ECC errors corrected since the boot? If not, AMD should write and promote one. Very curious on how often it happened for normal home/offic usage. I used to work for a silicon company who took a embedded network switch system with ECC logic to some nuclear lab for testing to verify/showcase the ECC functionalities.
- mjevans 9y ago
  Even if you never personally encounter an error, knowing that the 1 bit correct and 1+ bit likely detect exists will save you in terms of piece of mind and trouble-shooting other issues. Plus, if you're scrubbing your storage the last thing you want is a memory error killing your data.
- planteen 9y ago
  In Linux, yes, there is a service called mcelog and a utility from the edac-utils package called edac-util. You will see correctable ECC errors on systems. How frequent honestly seems to depend on the workload and the system itself. My suspicion is that often they are caused by poor PCB layout and ECC saves you. I spent literally weeks (nights, weekends) chasing down an issue I thought was a software bug but turned out a board layout issue on an embedded system. If the system had ECC, the error would have either been corrected or we would have gotten the uncorrectable ECC error trap. Since then, every workstation/server/desktop I spec is ECC. I wish more laptops had it.
  - srcmap 9y ago
    Thanks, Try the edac-util on 5 of 30+ or so servers. "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v3 @ 3.20GHz" with 128G RAM each. edac-util: No errors to report. System uptime ~30+ days. We recently have to move those servers. I wish I check this command before the move. The uptime should be 600 days + for some of the servers.

simcop2387 9y ago

In my case I've got a large amount of ram (128GB) and run many virtual machines for various purposes, along with that I've got 24TB of drives hooked up with ZFS running to back up those virtual machines, family photos and movies, etc. Being able to know that an error has happened and it's been corrected or handled appropriately (even killing the system and needing a reboot is appropriate) so that data isn't destroyed is a good thing for me.

koffiezet 9y ago

We just set up a Kubernetes cluster for building C++ and Java software. Thing is - you want to be absolutely sure that the software you software is built correctly and don't have any bit-flips ending up in your final builds, so ECC is an absolute must. Threadripper supporting this allowed us to create that cluster with cheap commodity hardware and made self-hosting the build-farm the clear financial winner, especially since we have tons of free rack-space (came with the building that was bought), already host servers locally - which means a lot support infrastructure is already in place, and have a solar surplus throughout the year in this building.