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Hardware memory faults are still possible right? And must be seen at AWS scale with enough equipment.
by quickthrower2 4y ago
Hardware memory faults are still possible right? And must be seen at AWS scale with enough equipment.
- kevincox 4y agoDefinitely. At a large company we used to be able to detect solar storms by checking the ECC error graph for different data centers around the world. The vast majority were correctable but of course probability says that a few were not.
- Groxx 4y agoPossible and fairly frequent - smaller components are sensitive to smaller energies. It's one of the reasons satellites don't use modern chips - they're too sensitive, bigger transistors and higher energies survive radiation better. One significant thing that has changed since then though is that in many cases, much of the RAM in use isn't doing something truly critical. Gigabytes are spent holding data, not behavior, so it manifests as a sightly miscolored pixel or a minor calculation difference. The odds of random flips changing something that'll be noticed are much lower. And truly critical stuff often runs multiple machines simultaneously, to detect one of them disagreeing. Which is much better than ECC, as it'll catch all flips anywhere, at the point it becomes relevant. Assuming you're not truly unlucky, and have similar flips on multiple machines.