101–110 of 161 posts
I have 128 GB of non-ecc memory in my notebook, never detected a single error, and has been on 24/7 for more than 4 years. Unless you live over 4000 meters over the sea level, like to compile while flying or live close to an unshielded nuclear reactor, you don't need ECC. And most memory problems you can fix by better cooling, and better shielding.
How would you know?
I have 128 GB of non-ecc memory in my notebook, never detected a single error, and has been on 24/7 for more than 4 years. Unless you live over 4000 meters over the sea level, like to compile while flying or live close to an unshielded nuclear reactor, you don't need ECC. And most memory problems you can fix by better cooling, and better shielding.
> I have 128 GB of non-ecc memory in my notebook, never detected a single error How would you know?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That we cannot get laptops or even desk machines with ECC, and so have them crash frequently, is seen as a trivial side effect of the strategy. How frequently would you say you encounter a crash that you can pin down to a lack of ECC memory in your laptop or desktop?
You can't, that's the thing, right? I have a Ryzen desktop with ECC, and it registers about one bit-flip per week. I don't know how many of those would become crashes, but I'm more worried about the ones that wouldn't.
This isn’t normal. You have a bad memory module.
A non-ECC machine should able to support memtest86 (a rigorous memory testing tool) for a week straight without a single bitflip.
Having a bit flip per week is so far away from normal that it’s definitely a bad memory part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have 128 GB of non-ecc memory in my notebook, never detected a single error How would you know?
I know that I never detected them. Also it never crashed nor malfunctioned in any way (thanks in part to Linux), so any undetected error didn't caused any problem.
Yes though, when you have gobs of memory, you're unlikely to see the effects of bit flips. That's not the same at them not occuring.
We've got a server that keeps rebooting due to a bad ECC DIMM chip. I thought the whole point of ECC was to keep the server going until we can replace the DIMM?
I have 128 GB of non-ecc memory in my notebook, never detected a single error, and has been on 24/7 for more than 4 years. Unless you live over 4000 meters over the sea level, like to compile while flying or live close to an unshielded nuclear reactor, you don't need ECC. And most memory problems you can fix by better cooling, and better shielding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ECC isn't a terribly complicated technology, and can be used in all those cases. In limited cases, a checksum is good enough. If you checksum outgoing data, and verify it on reception, then it being corrupted in transit whether on the network card or the cable can be detected and transparently compensated for. Really, we can do much better than to "get used to it".
You are under the impression that CPUs and other chips always perform the same instructions as are written in the code, and only RAM can flip bits because DRAM is DRAM :) It can (and should! whenever possible) be improved, not fixed. There's always that pesky gamma that can hit a specific transistor, even if it is deep underground. Gamma cannot be fully stopped. At certain scales data corruption becomes directly meas…
You replied: it should be improved, not (it cannot be completely 100%) fixed
Your error: replying to a strawman
I have 128 GB of non-ecc memory in my notebook, never detected a single error, and has been on 24/7 for more than 4 years. Unless you live over 4000 meters over the sea level, like to compile while flying or live close to an unshielded nuclear reactor, you don't need ECC. And most memory problems you can fix by better cooling, and better shielding.
Memory errors are heavily concentrated to bad modules. They’re not evenly distributed across all RAM. Always test the stability of your memory when doing a new build.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That we cannot get laptops or even desk machines with ECC, and so have them crash frequently, is seen as a trivial side effect of the strategy. How frequently would you say you encounter a crash that you can pin down to a lack of ECC memory in your laptop or desktop?
You can't, that's the thing, right? I have a Ryzen desktop with ECC, and it registers about one bit-flip per week. I don't know how many of those would become crashes, but I'm more worried about the ones that wouldn't.
yeah, you have bad ram. Or you overclocked it.
I have a Ryzen server with 32GB ECC RAM running 24/7 for a year. 0 bit flips. Not a single one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this a lot but I really don’t think it was/is that simplistic. It’s added complexity and cost for something that rarely would benefit most consumers. Now, you can argue that the complexity and cost is a nonissue on modern setups and I would probably agree. But Intel has long had desktop grade hardware with ECC support. The 440GX chipset supported ECC and I ran a Dell GX1 SFF with 768MB of ECC PC100 for yeeeears…
I miss the BX chipset. The last PC that wasn't a complete piece of shit I had was a 440BX chipset P3.