Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)

While I was at Google, someone asked one of the very early Googlers (I think it was Craig Silverstein, but it may've been Jeff Dean) what was the biggest mistake in their Google career, and they said "Not using ECC memory on early servers." If you look through the source code & postmortems from that era of Google, there are all sorts of nasty hacks and system design constraints that arose from the fact that you couldn't trust the bits…

I wish there was a hard requirement for ECC, as a developer working on GPU drivers, there's a huge amount of reported issues that just... don't make sense? One offs with slightly different symptoms, memory dumps of nonsense, just nowhere to start rooting out the cause for an issue. Even on "widely reported" issues that make it to reddit and similar. Probably not surprising, there's a naturally antagonistic relationship between Performance and Reliability here, and it's clear which way many…

Check, check, check. I only use ECC DRAM in my desktop these days and I monitor bit flips which on my 64GB desktop happen about once a month[1]. A similar rate on my FreeNAS device which also has ECC memory. Like others, I was super happy when I could by a Ryzen chip at retail prices and get ECC rather than buying a Xeon sku which was an extra $300. [1] When I first built the system I was getting…

That's Error-Correcting Code memory[0], not Elliptic-Curve Cryptography[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography