Re:Please Use ZFS with ECC Memory (2014)
by colechristensen on Saturday August 06, 2022 @06:33PM
(#32372218)
It’s not that errors don’t happen it’s that they are rare and the surface area of them affecting something important in an important way are incredibly rare.
I don’t care about triggering an occasional bug or a bit flip in a video stream, these things are inconsequential. If a bit gets flipped in a photo it’ll be a very slightly different photo. A piece of text will be slightly different… if either had the luck to be in memory ready to write when hit, in dozens of gigabytes of memory.
The most likely consequence of a bit flip is nothing at all happening because it hit unallocated memory. The next most likely consequence is nothing as it hit a piece of program memory that has no effect on operation and gets overwritten in moments.
ECC zealots are really excited about preventing something that just doesn’t happen all that often: actual data corruption with permanent significant effects.
I don’t care about triggering an occasional bug or a bit flip in a video stream, these things are inconsequential. If a bit gets flipped in a photo it’ll be a very slightly different photo. A piece of text will be slightly different… if either had the luck to be in memory ready to write when hit, in dozens of gigabytes of memory.
The most likely consequence of a bit flip is nothing at all happening because it hit unallocated memory. The next most likely consequence is nothing as it hit a piece of program memory that has no effect on operation and gets overwritten in moments.
ECC zealots are really excited about preventing something that just doesn’t happen all that often: actual data corruption with permanent significant effects.