*interest in parity-checking server RAM intensifies*
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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When I upgrade my home server I would like a low-power system with ECC RAM. I hope it will be financially viable in the future.
The problem is that ECC is one of the things used to permit price discrimination between server (less price sensitive) and PC (more price sensitive) users. Like, there's a significant price difference, more than cost-of-manufacture would warrant. There are only a few companies that make motherboard chipsets, like Intel, and they have enough price control over the industry that they can do that. You're going to be paying a fair bit more to get into the "server" ecosystem, as a result of that.
Also...I'm not sure that ECC is the right fix. I kind of wonder whether the fact is actually that the memory is broken, or that people are manually overclocking and running memory that would be stable at a lower rate at too high of a rate, which will cause that. Or whether BIOSes, which can automatically detect a viable rate by testing memory, are simply being too aggressive in choosing high memory bandwidth rates.
EDIT: If it is actually broken memory and only a region of memory is affected, both Linux and Windows have the ability to map around detected bad regions in memory, if you have the bootloader tell the kernel about them and enough of your memory is working to actually get your kernel up and running during initial boot. So it is viable to run systems that actually do have broken memory, if one can localize the problem.
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/badram.html
Something like MemTest86 is a more-effective way to do this, because it can touch all the memory. However, you can even do runtime detection of this with Linux up and running using something like memtester, so hypothetically someone could write a software package to detect this, update GRUB to be aware of the bad memory location, and after a reboot, just work correctly (well, with a small amount less memory available to the system...)
Also…I’m not sure that ECC is the right fix. I kind of wonder whether the fact is actually that the memory is broken, or that people are manually overclocking and running memory that would be stable at a lower rate at too high of a rate, which will cause that.
Some of it is cosmic rays, right? I think ECC is still worth it even at JEDEC speeds.
even at JEDEC speeds.
My last Intel motherboard couldn't handle all four slots filled with 32GB of memory at rated speeds. Any two sticks yes, four no. From reading online, apparently that was a common problem. Motherboard manufacturers (who must have known that there were issues, from their own testing) did not go out of their way to make this clear.
Maybe it's not an issue with registered/buffered memory, but with plain old unregistered DDR5, I think that manufacturers have really selling product above what they can realistically do.
I've been checking around the used market for DDR4. It seems used ECC DDR4 sticks are now cheaper due to low demand.
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In the middle rampocalypse you even wish for an ECC one?
There's no real good reason that all RAM shouldn't have been ECC since decades ago. It doesn't actually cost much more to implement. The only reason it isn't, as tal's reply mentioned, is artificial price discrimination.
Wouldn’t that mean ten percent of all crashes in all apps would be caused by bit flips? What makes Firefox special?
Anecdotal evidence, but I had both a 13th gen and 14th gen Intel CPU with the bug that caused them to over time, destroy themselves internally.
The most-user-visible way this initially came up, before the CPUs had degraded too far, was Firefox starting to crash, to the point that I initially used Firefox hitting some websites as my test case when I started the (painful) task of trying to diagnose the problem. I suspect that it's because Firefox touches a lot of memory, and is (normally) fairly stable
a lot of people might not be too surprised if some random game crashes.
You're assuming that app quality is constant. But if I made an app that crashes on launch, I can confidently say 0% of those crashes would be from bitflips.
Firefox isn't special in some way that could cause bitflips, but it's 1) where this data was collected (and why this post isnt talking about some other product) and 2) speaks to the quality of FF, because crashes are rare enough for bit flips to be a significant crash factor.
The takeaway is that for the FF team, and anyone using ram (everyone), bitflips are more common than expected
As a long time Firefox user, I believe Firefox sees orders of magnitude more RAM issues than other apps because it is using orders of magnitude more RAM than other apps.
I suspect the stuff Firefox stores in ram is more sensitive, too. A lot of games load tens of gigabytes of textures, but a bitflip in that stuff will lead to a pixel somewhere being the wrong colour instead of a crash.
You Firefox also hoards RAM? I thought it's just mine.
No, they're saying Firefox uses so much ram they're far far more likely to be a victim!
Laughs in Memory: 46.84 GiB / 62.72 GiB (75%) with (probably) several hundred tabs open
It would be interesting to see how this works in Chrome. I would guess that it could be the same - people tend to leave their browsers open with hundreds of tabs and will never reboot their laptops. If you play a random game for 2 hours, bit flips shouldn't be a problem. But if you keep your browser open for weeks or months with hundreds of tabs, that may cause problems.
... I can't imagine having a browser with hundreds of open tabs. That would tend me of the old days of Netscape Navigator and all the popups and browser add on cancer.
Ahh the nostalgic days of the early Dotcom era. I sometimes miss you geocities
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Lol