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
ECC memory and server hardware in general is surprisingly cheap if you’re fine buying used gear that’s a few years old. Once that stuff gets old enough that it’s being cycled out of data centers en masse, it hits the used market and the supply often exceeds the limited demand for that kind of stuff.
With that said, I don’t know if that’s true at the moment.
I’ve been checking around the used market for DDR4. It seems used ECC DDR4 sticks are now cheaper due to low demand.
ECC memory and server hardware in general is surprisingly cheap if you’re fine buying used gear that’s a few years old. Once that stuff gets old enough that it’s being cycled out of data centers en masse, it hits the used market and the supply often exceeds the limited demand for that kind of stuff.
With that said, I don’t know if that’s true at the moment.