A long while ago, I worked on part of a memory system that during development we knew was corrupting RAM. The amazing thing, is just how high the error rates co

A long while ago, I worked on part of a memory system that during development we knew was corrupting RAM. The amazing thing, is just how high the error rates could get before the machine would actually crash. That is largely because so much of RAM is code that doesn't get executed and data structures that are resistant to random corruption. Even actual dat corruption when it happens is frequently subtle because it flips a transaction timestamp by one digit in the midst of millions of transactions/etc, or the data is transient a video frame with a miscolored pixel, etc. Its really like playing Russian roulette with a revolver that has a few (b/m)illion chambers. Generally by the time you see actual program crashes or notice data corruption your system is really good and screwed. That is part of why people in the know are so afraid of RAM corruption. It can be persisted and exist silently for a very long time before someone tries reading some file/transaction that was corrupted during a write years back, or the database suddenly starts crashing after it updates some index as part of a GC pass/whatever, while the actual bug/HW failure will never be reproduced.