A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
Probably not the use case you’d want to buy ECC for. I considered it for my homebuild because I figured I might process a lot of data at once, and I would appreciate the piece of mind… but I still decided no because I could get more ram for the same price if it were not ECC.
Guess Linus was right again to only use ECC RAM.
Which Linus?
The guy with the blanket from Charlie Brown
Torvalds
Linus when he was with Linus
Let’s spend a ton of extra money minimizing edge case crashing in a browser!!!
🙄
I always love it when folks who don’t actually know what they’re talking about, comment like they do…
It’s not just the browser. This example is the browser, but it’s your entire system stability that is affected by random bit flips.
I don’t know about you, but I use my RAM for a lot more than a browser.
I have lga 1356 xeon 2470v2 with 64gb ddr3 ecc ram, cheap and good setup
You enthusiasts server people, the dozens of you, are not the average consumer.
Who is talking about average consumers? We’re not trying to market something here.
Linus was. The answer is Linus. 🤦♂️ Jesus Christ guys. Two of you.
DDR5 pretty much has ECC built in.
Linus would disagree with you there. It’s got a form of ECC, but it isn’t the same as server RAM ECC.
When ECC no longer costs a mortgage, I will look into upgrading.
Yeah I can’t remember the last time my browser crashed. No way I’m upgrading all that hardware to avoid something that happens that seldom.
Probably not the use case you’d want to buy ECC for. I considered it for my homebuild because I figured I might process a lot of data at once, and I would appreciate the piece of mind… but I still decided no because I could get more ram for the same price if it were not ECC.