Report shows RAM reliability less than expected
Google has a lot of computers, thousands and thousands of them. That puts the company in a position to gather a lot of information about the reliability of computer components and periodically Google releases some of its data. For example, some of the best information about hard drive failure rates came from a study by Carnegie Mellon and Google.
Recently, Google provided some results of a study of computer memory. The results are that RAM is less reliable than had been expected. Ars Technica comments on the findings:
Google’s 2.5-year study of DRAM error rates in its datacenters is the largest such real-world study ever released; prior studies have been based on lab tests done under artificially high-stress conditions, with the results then extrapolated to give a picture of real-world conditions. Google engineers tracked errors as they happened, and logged both the errors and relevant data like temperature, CPU utilization, and memory allocated. After analyzing the data, they drew seven main conclusions about the nature, frequency, and causes of DRAM errors.
The headline conclusion in the study is that DRAM errors are vastly more common than is typically assumed. Nearly one-third of the individual machines in the study saw at least one error per year, a rate that’s orders of magnitude higher than previous research had indicated. To give some hard numbers, previous studies report 200 to 5,000 failures in time per billion hours of operation (FIT) per Mbit; Google found that their numbers were between 25,000 and 75,000 FIT per Mbit.
On the bright side, most of these errors are the result of a few bad apples. About 8 percent of DIMMs were responsible for over 90 percent of the errors, as DIMMs that produced one error were hundreds of times more likely to produce another error in the same month.
One interesting finding is that RAM errors increase markedly with age. If your aging computer is acting flaky, maybe it’s the RAM.
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