Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ECC RAM should be a human right

dmitrybrant.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 146 posts

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#101

Post by formerly_proven »

bsder wrote: post #58
chatmasta wrote: post #47

> It was the worst-case scenario for RAM failure: bit flip errors that get written back to the disk. I discovered that several video files that I had been editing had corrupted bits, and were no longer usable. What a horrible failure mode! Kudos to the OP for even thinking to investigate this. The mentioned memtest86 tool sounds quite useful - so useful, in fact, that it seems it should be part of the operating syste…

> Is there a good reason why this isn't the default behavior of operating systems Because any equivalent of memtestx86 will flag a LOT of hardware for the buggy piles of shit that they really are. If Windows started flagging people's crappy cheap hardware, Microsoft would get a lot of grief and have to spend a chunk of money on customer support and PR.

I dunno, I've had overclocked memory where memtest86 wouldn't report errors in multiple passes, yet TestMem5 (weird win32 tool from some .ru site) tells you it's bad in about ten seconds. memtest86 doesn't seem to be that stressful for memory.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#102

Post by ls65536 »

giardia wrote: post #84

Oh god this gives me flashbacks. I never knew how bad corruption was on home computers until I started using git annex on a multi-terabyte file collection. No matter which computer or disk I used, it would inevitably happen. Then I started to wonder how much corruption had crept in before I was using git annex and never noticed it. I've basically given up on maintaining large digital media collections for long term p…

How about storing the data on a filesystem that performs data checksumming, also configured in a RAID-1-like mirroring profile to enable any corruption to also be corrected? Filesystems like ZFS or BTRFS could be a good choice here.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#103

Post by sitkack »

Read the paper(s) below. Absolutely frightening, we all basically swimming in quicksand. ECC should be mandatory! Not using it is like huffing leaded gas.

Silent Data Corruptions at Scale https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11245

Harish Dixit has two other papers available https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Dixit%2C...

Revisiting Memory Errors in Large-Scale Production Data Centers: Analysis and Modeling of New Trends from the Field https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/memory-errors-at-faceb...

Justin Meza has a similar body of research. https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Justin-Meza/144606145

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#104

Post by karmakaze »

hamandcheese wrote: post #75
nimish wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And AMD, and Nvidia.

AMD ryzen CPUs have ECC support, but it varies by motherboard. My home NAS runs a Ryzen in an ASrock Rack motherboard with ECC ram. I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?). It was also a bit hard finding the right ram, but there’s a brand called Nemix that I found. I was a bit sketched out by the brand, but the chips themselves were Micron.

AMD used to not segment ECC for non-consuner lines. It wasn't very popular with consumers. So I can't really blame them for not supporting it well. One way that is a good balance is to make it work but not officially supported on consumer lines. Then it's up to mb vendors and buyers to take advantage if worthwhile to them. That's enough to not cut into non-consuner lines or add support costs to consumer pricing.

One thing that could change this quick is if Apple used ECC. Others would follow to not seem inferior. I don't hear Apple users complain much at all about lack of ECC options.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#105

Post by sitkack »

mike_hock wrote: post #60
chatmasta wrote: post #47

> It was the worst-case scenario for RAM failure: bit flip errors that get written back to the disk. I discovered that several video files that I had been editing had corrupted bits, and were no longer usable. What a horrible failure mode! Kudos to the OP for even thinking to investigate this. The mentioned memtest86 tool sounds quite useful - so useful, in fact, that it seems it should be part of the operating syste…

memtest86 needs to run alone so it can test the entire physical RAM, and the actual, meaningful tests that actually test RAM and not L1 take forever to run. What would you have the OS do?

It still doesn't have full access it doesn't memtest its own code segment for instance. Memtest can also be run as a usermode program (although it needs permission to lock the pages in memory).

https://linux.die.net/man/8/memtester

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#106

Post by antisthenes »

JohnBooty wrote: post #55
eric__cartman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people prefer to trade off stability for a slight performance improvement. With modern hardware I don't think it's worth it to be honest. I want my computer to work day in and day out even if it means a 2% lower score in some benchmark.

Some people prefer to trade off stability for a slight performance improvement. In my PC, I've got a Intel Core i5-3570K (3.4ghz stock) overclocked to 4.5ghz or something silly like that. I used the motherboard manufacturer's "one touch overclocking" feature to determine that speed years ago and haven't touched it since. The performance improvement is more than slight. Stability is rock solid across thousands of hour…

That's around the last generation when it was worth to overclock things, because the headroom on a typical consumer-grade -K cpu was at least 25%.

Personally, I run a 4670K at 4Ghz, and it's been rock stable as my main machine for the last 8.5 years. It's finally beginning to show its age in 22-23, but the longevity and use I got out of a $200 processor is incredible.

But when CPUs auto-turbo to 5+ Ghz, I agree, overclocking sort of loses its luster.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#107

Post by gautamcgoel »

Retric wrote: post #97
gautamcgoel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study is very old and is based on long-outdated DRAM tech. I suspect that DDR5 has much lower error rates.

I would welcome more recent data, but I doubt we are talking about a 4 orders of magnitude change to get to /year vs /hour error rates.

Actually, Samsung claimed a factor of a million lower error rate in DDR5 vs DDR4 due to the on-die ECC.

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16900/samsung-teases-512-gb-d...

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#108

Post by veidr »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #5

Still wild to me we lost ECC RAM. It used to be standard in PCs. Does Apple hardware come with ECC RAM? If anyone could make it make sense as a business, it's them.

Apple does not make any Macs with ECC RAM any more.

This was the reason I always used Mac Pro machines, and at the end, iMac Pro: those machines had ECC RAM, and incidentally always seemed more stable over months and years than the MacBook Pros I had, which didn’t.

(Of course, there are a lot of reasons why a laptop might crash or malfunction an order of magnitude more than a desktop machine. The benefits of ECC RAM are really hard to catch definitively in the wild. We know they exist though, so I’m in the “it’s insane not to use ECC RAM for any use case that persisting data and then reading it back later” camp.)

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#109

Post by SergeAx »

I don't know. I am building my own computers for about 30 years, starting with Intel 486, and using them heavily. Couple of times I bought ECC memory, but most of the time - not. For the last 4 years I have 64G of non-ECC RAM. Maybe I had some problem with non-ECC memory during all those years, like sudden BSODs, freezes or some corrupted data, but never anything significant. So I honestly don't see a reason for drama here.
Post reply on HN