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Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

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Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#131

Post by derefr »

comex wrote: post #122
derefr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The number of people who religiously check PGP signatures/SHA256sums or whatever is miniscule. • If you transfer things around using BitTorrent, it'll ensure you always end up with a file that hashes correctly to the sum it originally had when the .torrent file was constructed. • Many archive formats (zip, rar, and 7z, at least) contain checksums, and archival utilities validate those checksums during extraction, r…

Both macOS/iOS and Windows use code signing for executables, which should guard against most types of corruption. Web pages (and anything else) transmitted over HTTPS are protected from corruption in transit by TLS's hashing (which is vastly stronger than the checksums at lower levels of the network stack), though that doesn't help if the server has faulty memory or storage. PNG has built-in checksums, though other i…

> Web pages (and anything else) transmitted over HTTPS are protected from corruption in transit by TLS's hashing (which is vastly stronger than the checksums at lower levels of the network stack), though that doesn't help if the server has faulty memory or storage.

I didn't bring this one (or any other transport-level checksums) up, because we were talking about whether you can trust something "across the whole process"—from its origin developer's disk (where it might get an initial explicit checksum generated), to origin memory, across the network to a server's memory, to that server's disk, over the network again to a CDN reverse-proxy's memory, maybe its disk, then the network again to you, then your memory, your disk, and finally your memory again as you verify it. Oh, and a bunch of routers and switches in between, of course.

Static checksums that are baked into file formats or manifest files protect the file across that whole chain. Transport-level checksums only ensure that the one part they're involved in happened correctly.

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#132

Post by epx »

I think that, given the personal importance of computing devices and storage, no filesystem should exist w/o checksum of metadata+data, and no RAM should be without ECC. The slight increase in cost does not justify the risk.

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#133

Post by rocky1138 »

muro wrote: post #34
mikeash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on gaming, but e-mail often contains important information that I wouldn't want to suffer from random corruption.

I don't understand why anyone would run their own email server. Cloud offerings work so well and are cheap.

> cheap

Hard to beat free. Couple this with the fact that I learn something by setting it up makes this a win for me.

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#134

Post by pvg »

jacquesm wrote: post #127
pvg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these are not contractually obliged to run their own email servers so whatever problem they have, it's not that specific one.

No, but they are contractually required to keep their customers (and their own) data confidential. And that can lead to them deciding to run their own mailservers as well as other infrastructure. Whether that's a good decision or not is another matter, that mostly depends on execution.

Right, what I mean is that your average legal practice, notary public, journalist doesn't actually have this problem like you said. Cloud services cover them just fine.

Somewhat unrelated, your comment gave me the idea to look up the MX records of the last few law firms I've interacted with: mostly cloud, as expected. The biggest and fanciest likely probably has their own servers. Their terminating MX is some middling cheapo hosting company. Disturbing.

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#135

Post by rfrank »

michaelmrose wrote: post #94
user5994461 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an inappropriate leap. Consumers should have ECC memory too. However the consumer market has long decided to settle for ECC nowhere and cheap everywhere. ECC hardware comes at premium option that can easily be +100%. You need support in the memory, the motherboard and the CPU. Given the price difference, personal computers will have to live with the memory errors. People will not pay double for their computers.…

Amd has modestly priced hardware that supports ecc

Was that the case before Ryzen? I know their new CPUs support ECC, but I'm not sure for earlier generations.

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#136

Post by jacquesm »

pvg wrote: post #134
jacquesm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but they are contractually required to keep their customers (and their own) data confidential. And that can lead to them deciding to run their own mailservers as well as other infrastructure. Whether that's a good decision or not is another matter, that mostly depends on execution.

Right, what I mean is that your average legal practice, notary public, journalist doesn't actually have this problem like you said. Cloud services cover them just fine. Somewhat unrelated, your comment gave me the idea to look up the MX records of the last few law firms I've interacted with: mostly cloud, as expected. The biggest and fanciest likely probably has their own servers. Their terminating MX is some middlin…

Yes, I would agree that for most companies that are in this position rolling your own could easily end up being more problematic than going with gmail or office365. That doesn't mean it does not happen and when it happens they are usually sitting ducks.

The chances of your average law office having an IT staff with capabilities comparable to Google are nil. At the same time the legacy of Snowden has caused a lot of companies to wonder if they're wise to put anything off-premises. And then there's dropbox, weshare and a million other 'handy' services that could easily hoover up and analyze everything that passes through (or whoever hacked them).

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#137

Post by 8note »

marcosdumay wrote: post #128
derefr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ultimately there's very little you can actually do reliably if your memory is lying to you 1. Implement everything in terms of retry-able jobs; ensure that jobs fail when they hit checksum errors. 2. if you've got a bytecode-executing VM, extend it to compare its modules to stored checksums, just before it returns from them; and to throw an exception instead of returning if it finds a problem. (This is a lot like M…

How do you calculate those checksums without relying on the memory?

the chances of the memory erroring in such a way that the checksum still matches becomes quite small

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#138

Post by yuhong »

user5994461 wrote: post #86
loeg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is roughly 3% chance of error in RAM per DIMM per year. That doesn't justify buying ECC if you have just one personal computer to worry about. How do you make that leap?

It's an inappropriate leap. Consumers should have ECC memory too. However the consumer market has long decided to settle for ECC nowhere and cheap everywhere. ECC hardware comes at premium option that can easily be +100%. You need support in the memory, the motherboard and the CPU. Given the price difference, personal computers will have to live with the memory errors. People will not pay double for their computers.…

Bristol Ridge does support ECC BTW, but one problem is that you can't use ECC with x16 chips (because ECC is 72-bit), so with 8GB of RAM and 8Gbit chips you have to choose between non-ECC/ECC single channel with x8 chips and non-ECC dual channel with x16 chips. 4Gbit don't have this problem but will become obsolete especially when 18nm ramps up, and while DRAM prices should decline when that happens...

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#139

Post by fgonzag »

gh02t wrote: post #124
tdb7893 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more expensive is ECC ram? I don't have it and I've never experienced obvious issues, if it's a lot more expensive it's not really worth it for the once or twice the desktop will likely experience an actual issue

It's significantly more expensive, usually around 30-100% more, depending on capacity. IMO not worth it on a desktop, possibly worth it on a home server or a serious workstation. Plus your CPU and motherboard has to support it, which is a pain with Intel's consumer lineup.

Good thing ryzen supports ECC OBO. Just waiting on motherboard support for it.

Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

#140

Post by marcosdumay »

Retra wrote: post #130
marcosdumay wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you calculate those checksums without relying on the memory?

You can't really, but you are now requiring the error to occur specifically in the memory containing your checksum, rather than anywhere in your data.

It deeper than that. What are you calculating the checksum of? Is it corrupted already?

If you can't trust your RAM, you have no hard truth to rely on. It's only probabilistic programing or living with the errors.

(Although, rereading the GP, he seems to be talking about corrupted binaries. Yes, you can catch corrupted binaries, but only after they corrupted some data.)

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