3 ms·
Practically speaking, ECC is extra insurance against faulty memory. It's true that ECC will catch errors caused by cosmic rays, but in practice most memory err
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Practically speaking, ECC is extra insurance against faulty memory.
It's true that ECC will catch errors caused by cosmic rays, but in practice most memory errors are just from faulty memory. Large studies in Google datacenters showed that the errors were heavily concentrated in a small number of DIMMs: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
The catch is that you don't really know if you have one of these faulty memory sticks. I always run memtest86 overnight to check for obviously faulty memory, but some of these errors could take months to manifest.
I had a laptop with a RAM cell that failed. It would show up in memtest86 in a matter of minutes, yet surprisingly I didn't notice the issue for a very long time in day to day usage. I always wonder if there were random bit flips in anything I worked with during that period, but I'll never know.
With ECC, it's just one less thing to worry about.
- glandium 5y agoOne part of the equation is that a shit-ton amount of memory modules are, in fact, overclocked (e.g. do you think your DDR4-4800 runs at nominal speed?). That surely contributes to memory being faulty.
- mmis1000 5y agoDDR4 Memory these day are rarely runs at their default frequency (2666,2333) unless you buy a really cheap one. Most 3200/3600 memory are in fact overclocked(Just the factory pre-configure the overclock setting with xmp) except for a few ones that are natively 3200(some memory from micron are natively 3200 at 1.2v).