4 ms·

The entire computing industry is based on trading-off the probability & effects of failure with cost. Why would you even bother with ECC when practically no one

The entire computing industry is based on trading-off the probability & effects of failure with cost. Why would you even bother with ECC when practically no one except maybe server farms with tens of 24h-on servers would notice a thing? Even a single micro-cent per device spent on improving testing would have a much more felt-through effect on the entire computing landscape.

kiririn 3y ago
For desktop computers most of the value of ECC comes from not corrupting your hard disk when a ram stick spontaneously goes bad, rather than protecting against once in a blue moon bit flips
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  ECC is kind of useless when a RAM stick "spontaneously goes bad", unless precisely you are talking about the situation where a single bit goes bad (which is, indeed, less than once in a blue moon).
  - kiririn 3y ago
    It will spew warnings if correctly setup and may even be able to correct for the fault. Anything that highlights the problem before your unstable system silently corrupts files (and their backups) or hoses its filesystem is a godsend
JonChesterfield 3y ago
This one does pervasive damage to software quality though. You get a bug report, it doesn't reproduce easily. The thought is always there: "maybe their hardware had a transient error?". If it did you have no bug to find. That's attractive. If storage drives reported writes accurately and memory didn't occasionally silently corrupt, software falling over would be more likely to imply an error the developer is empowered to fix.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  ECC RAM doesn't prevent _all_ hardware transient errors. It doesn't even prevent the majority of them. But whenever you get a bug report, is really the first thing that comes to mind "maybe their hardware had a transient error?"? The amount of software vs hardware bugs is still like a thousand to one, and that's _even_ for companies which receive a disproportionate amount of hardware errors (like OS vendors). For regular software, I'd bet it's a couple million to one.

kiririn 3y ago

For desktop computers most of the value of ECC comes from not corrupting your hard disk when a ram stick spontaneously goes bad, rather than protecting against once in a blue moon bit flips

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
ECC is kind of useless when a RAM stick "spontaneously goes bad", unless precisely you are talking about the situation where a single bit goes bad (which is, indeed, less than once in a blue moon).
- kiririn 3y ago
  It will spew warnings if correctly setup and may even be able to correct for the fault. Anything that highlights the problem before your unstable system silently corrupts files (and their backups) or hoses its filesystem is a godsend

JonChesterfield 3y ago

This one does pervasive damage to software quality though. You get a bug report, it doesn't reproduce easily. The thought is always there: "maybe their hardware had a transient error?". If it did you have no bug to find. That's attractive. If storage drives reported writes accurately and memory didn't occasionally silently corrupt, software falling over would be more likely to imply an error the developer is empowered to fix.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
ECC RAM doesn't prevent _all_ hardware transient errors. It doesn't even prevent the majority of them. But whenever you get a bug report, is really the first thing that comes to mind "maybe their hardware had a transient error?"? The amount of software vs hardware bugs is still like a thousand to one, and that's _even_ for companies which receive a disproportionate amount of hardware errors (like OS vendors). For regular software, I'd bet it's a couple million to one.