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Google Finds DRAM Errors More Common Than Believed

Posted by kdawson on from the forget-me-not dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A Google study of DRAM errors in their data centers found that they are hundreds to thousands of times more common than has been previously believed. Hard errors may be the most common failure type. The DIMMs themselves appear to be of good quality, and bad mobo design may be the biggest problem." Here is the study (PDF), which Google engineers published with a researcher from the University of Toronto.

23 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. Percentage? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "a mean of 3,751 correctable errors per DIMM per year."

    I'm much to lazy to do the math. Let's round up - 4k errors per year has to be a vanishingly small percentage for a system that is up 24/7/365, or 5 nines. The fact that these DIMMs were "stressed" makes me wonder about the validity of the test. Heat stress, among other things, will multiply errors far beyond what you will see in normal service.

    --
    "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    1. Re:Percentage? by gspear · · Score: 5, Informative
      From the study's abstract:

      "We find that temperature, known to strongly impact DIMM error rates in lab conditions, has a suprisingly small effect on error behavior in the field, when taking all other factors into account."

    2. Re:Percentage? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, I don't believe so. They use server boards, custom made to their specs. And, I'm pretty sure that those specs include ECC memory - that is the standard for servers, after all. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html If you're really interested, that story gives you a starting point to google from.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    3. Re:Percentage? by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Add to that the fact that Google (apparently) tends to run their data centers "hot" compared to what is commonly accepted, and use significantly cheaper components, and you've got a good explanation for why their error count is as high as it is.

      Yeah, but let's look at the more common situation - a home. Variable temperatures, most likely QUITE variable power quality, low-quality PSU, and almost certaily no UPS to make up for it. Add that to low-quality commodity components (mobo & RAM).

      I'd not be surprised to find the problem much more prevalent in non-datacenter environments.

      Switching to high-quality memory, PSU & UPS has made my systems unbelievably reliable the last several years. YMMV, but I doubt by much.

    4. Re:Percentage? by jasonwc · · Score: 4, Informative

      The article suggests that errors are less likely on systems with few DIMMS, those which are less heavily used, and that there was no significant difference among types of RAM or vendors, at least with regard to ECC RAM. Thus, laptop and desktop users, who likely only have 2 or 3 DIMMs and make only casual use of their systems have lower risk of errors. ECC RAM may in general be of much higher quality than non-ECC RAM, and thus more prone to error, but its usage is also less mission-critical. In addition, ECC RAM is usually used in systems with many DIMMs that are run 24/7/365.

      Good news
      The study had several findings that are good news for consumers:

              * Temperature plays little role in errors - just as Google found with disk drives - so heroic cooling isnâ€(TM)t necessary.
              * The problem isnâ€(TM)t getting worse. The latest, most dense generations of DRAM perform as well, error wise, as previous generations.
              * Heavily used systems have more errors - meaning casual users have less to worry about.
              * No significant differences between vendors or DIMM types (DDR1, DDR2 or FB-DIMM). You can buy on price - at least for the ECC-type DIMMS they investigated.
              * Only 8% of DIMMs had errors per year on average. Fewer DIMMs = fewer error problems - good news for users of smaller systems.

    5. Re:Percentage? by silent_artichoke · · Score: 5, Funny

      You know, maybe googling it isn't the best idea in this case. Memory errors and all...

    6. Re:Percentage? by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Informative

      I work on server design, specifically motherboards. ECC is a feature, it helps prevent bit errors from passing through undetected. It is not a method for preventing errors from happening in the first place, nor does it influence the number of bit errors. That is a property of the motherboard design, the chipset, the DIMM PCB and the DRAM. Second, just because you provide a spec for a mobo, does not mean that it is all inclusive. Generally people specify form factor, power, features. They don't specify quality and in most cases don't give a criteria for what it means for a feature to "work". In fact most customers I've talked to don't really understand what quality means from hardware (and sometimes in general). Hardware management, much like software, is designed with similar principles of impact/effort: if customers don't care, we don't test. In other words if it ain't listed on the box, or the salesman won't write it down, just assume it wasn't done.

      In spite of the fact that computer motherboards are digital electronics, there is in fact anything but a binary determination of "work" and "not work". Digital signals are an engineering approximation, one which falls apart at high speeds, dense routing and inexpensive design. Well designed and tested motherboards have a well known bit error rate, and reliable companies will not ship a new design until they meet their target. I do this on systems I design, but they aren't cheap, not by a lot. It is a very expensive, time consuming process, one which most companies really want to get rid of. Not all systems are so thoroughly tested, in fact the vast majority of boards out there, server or otherwise, aren't tested much at all.

      Forking money for ECC is very similar to paying the mob to protect you. Yes, it will give you more peace of mind, but what you really want is to not be having these problems to begin with. For people who care about data integrity, you should be asking what the bit error rate is and how they know. If they don't know, then you don't want it, ECC or no ECC. Don't assume "the industry" is equal, and don't assume that because a vendor's product X is really good that their product Y is really good too: you WILL be wrong, particularly on computers.

    7. Re:Percentage? by Mr+Z · · Score: 4, Informative

      "Regular RAM" has neither parity nor ECC.

      The original PC added a 9th bit to each byte, creating parity RAM. It was unique among personal computers at the time. None (or nearly none) of the original PC's contemporaries did this. But, since IBM did, many clones followed suit in the PC space. Macs, notably, didn't support ECC for many, many years, but if you pop open a Columbia Data Products PC, you'll see parity RAM. (Note "128K RAM with parity" in that scan.) IBM went with byte parity in part because bytes were the smallest memory unit the CPU read or wrote to the memory. With byte parity, every memory access could be protected.

      This ratio of 9/8 stuck with the PC's memory system over the years, following it to ever wider interfaces. That includes the 16 bit buses of the 286 and 386SX, the 32-bit buses of the 386DX and 486, and the 64 bit bus of the original Pentium. While many manufacturers made the byte parity optional as a cost saver, it was still rather common.

      Once you get to 64 bits, you have 8 extra parity bits for a total memory width of 72 bits. This is enough bits to implement a single-error correct, double-error detect Hamming code on the 64-bit data. As long as you always read or write in multiples of 64 bits, you can also generate the Hamming code on writes and check it on reads.

      Note that caveat: "As long as you always read or write in multiples of 64 bits." By the time you get to the 486 era, on-board L1 caches started to become standard equipment. Caches can turn a single byte read or write into a multiple byte line-fill (assuming they do read-allocate and write-allocate). They can also make writes wider. In write-back mode, they tend to write back the entire cache line if any portion was updated. In write-through mode, they could theoretically package additional bytes from the cache line to go with whatever bytes the CPU wrote to get to a minimum data size. (I don't know if the 486 or Pentium actually did this, FWIW. I'm speaking of general principles of operation.)

      The combination of caches and wider buses made ECC practical for PC hardware starting with the Pentium. That's why you started to see it in that time frame and not before.

      BTW, the error rate for individual DRAM bit flips should increase as the bits get smaller. It doesn't surprise me that your Pentium Pro's bits never flipped. It was probably built around 16 megabit DRAM chips, or maybe 64 megabit. If you compare a 16 megabit DRAM chip to a 1 gigabit DRAM chip of the same physical size, the bit cells on the gigabit chip are 1/64th the size. That means far fewer electrons holding the bit. As you can imagine, that might increase the likelihood of error per bit. Google's study didn't show an increase in error rate across memory technologies, but its window of memory technologies didn't stretch back 15 years to the Pentium Pro era.

      There's also just the total quantity of memory. Your Pentium Pro system probably had at most 128MB. Compare that to a modern system with 4GB. A 4GB system has 32x the memory of a 128MB system. Even if the per-bit error rate remained constant, there are 32x as many bits, so 32x as many errors. Modern systems also implement scrubbing, meaning they actively read all of memory in the background looking for errors. Older systems just waited for the CPU to access a word with a bad bit to raise an error. This also makes the observed error rate drastically different, since many errors would go by unnoticed in a system without scrubbing, but would get proactively noticed (and fixed) in a system with scrubbing.

      FWIW, I run my systems these days with ChipKill ECC enabled and scrubbing enabled. Not taking chances. I'll give up 3-5% on performance since most of the time I won't notice it.

      --
      Program Intellivision!
  2. Re:ZFS by jfengel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Changing your file system solves RAM errors how?

  3. Bus errors! by redelm · · Score: 5, Informative
    Hard DRAM errors are rather hard to explain if the cells are good -- maybe a bad write. After much DRAM testing (I use memtest86+ weeklong), I've yet to find bad cells.

    What I have seen (and generated) is the occasional (2-3/day) bus error with specific (nasty) datapatterns. Usually at a few addr. I write that off to mobo trace design and crosstalk between the signals. Failing to round the corners sufficiently, or leaving spurs is the likely problem. I think Hypertransport is a balanced design (push-pull differential like ethernet) and should be less succeptible.

  4. ECC on a home system? by eison · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've always thought it would be a nice-to-have feature for my home system to have ECC - perhaps it might degrade over time and misbehave less if it could detect and fix some errors. But my normal sources don't seem to stock many choices. E.g. Newegg appears to have 2 motherboards to choose from, both for AMD CPUs, nothing for Intel. Frys appears to have one, same, AMD only. Is this just the way things are, or do I need to be looking somewhere else? Would picking one of these motherboards end up in not working out well for my gaming rig?

    --
    is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
    1. Re:ECC on a home system? by DAldredge · · Score: 4, Informative

      A lot of the AMD boards support ECC RAM but newegg doesn't show it. Most every AM2 motherboard supports it. My main workstation at home is a Phenom II with 8GB ECC RAM mainly for that reason.

  5. Re:Gentoo?? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I would suspect that it has no bearing on you at all. Simply chanting "Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo" should cure any and all hardware errors. You're safe, AC.

    I'll keep this fool occupied, someone go call the guys in white coats for me.

    --
    "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  6. Dell by ^_^x · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In my experience at work ordering Dell desktops and laptops, by far the most common defect is 1-3% of machines with bad RAM. Typically it's made by Hynix, occasionally Hyundai, and I've never seen other brands fail. On many occasions though, I've predicted Hynix, pulled it, and sure enough theirs was the piece causing the errors in Memtest86+...

    1. Re:Dell by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Hyundai is Hynix and they are the second largest DRAM manufacturer by marketshare (roughly 20% second to Samsung's 30%).

      Its no surprise that you've only seen Hynix brand fail in Dells, chances are they are in 90%+ of Dell (and HP and Apple) boxes because they primarily buy from Hynix in the first place. Its selection bias.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  7. Misleading, to say the very least. by jhfry · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Read the article and remember they are talking averages here.

    They give it away with this line:

    Only 8% of DIMMs had errors per year on average. Fewer DIMMs = fewer error problems - good news for users of smaller systems

    Essentially, only 8% of their ECC DIMM's reported ANY errors in a given year.

    Also this was pretty telling:

    Besides error rates much higher than expected - which is plenty bad - the study found that error rates were motherboard, not DIMM type or vendor, dependent.

    And this:

    For all platforms they found that 20% of the machines with errors make up more than 90% of all observed errors on that platform.

    So essentially, they are saying that only 8% of DIMMSs reported errors, 90% of which were on 20% of the machines that had errors, mostly because of motherboard issues... yet DIMMs are less reliable than previously thought.

    I would imagine that if you removed all of the bad motherboards, power supplies, environmental, and other issues... that DIMMs are actually more reliable than I previously thought, not less! I wonder what percentage of CPU operations yield incorrect results. With Billions of instructions per second, even an astronomically low average of undetected cpu errors would guarantee an error at least as often as failed DIMMs.

    What I did take from the article was that without ECC ram, you have no way of knowing that your RAM has errors. I guess I should rethink my belief that ECC was a waste of money.

    --
    Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
  8. "RAID"-style system for RAM... by MattRog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    RAM is dirt cheap and most server systems support significantly more RAM than most people bother to install. For critical systems, ECC works but that doesn't prevent everything (double bit errors etc.). Is it time for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive DIMMs? Many HA servers now support Memory Mirroring (aka RAID-1 http://www.rackaid.com/resources/rackaid-blog/server-dysfunction/memory_mirroring_to_the_rescue/) but should there be more research into different RAID levels for memory (RAID5-6, 10, etc?)

    --

    Thanks,
    --
    Matt
  9. Want to confirm? Look at your bittorrent log. by sshir · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously. If you download a lot, and I do, you see quite a few checksum mismatches in the log.
    Especially if the torrent is old. Some of them may be sabotage activity, but I doubt that, considering kind of files.

    They are not transmission errors: TCP-IP checks for that. Not hard drive errors - again checksums. They can be intrasystem transmission errors though.

    I remember folks who did complete checkers wrote that they had a lot of them too.

    1. Re:Want to confirm? Look at your bittorrent log. by rdebath · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The TCP/IP checksums are really weak, only 16bits and rather a poor algorithm anyway. So more than one in 65 thousand errors will be undetected by a TCP/IP checksum. And that's not including buggy network adaptors and drivers that 'fix' or ignore the checksums.

      If you're transferring gigabytes of data you really need something a lot better.

      Still that's probably not the most common source of errors. You see the same problem exists when data is transferred across an IDE or SCSI bus if there's a checksum at all it's very weak and the amounts of data transferred across a disk bus are scary.

    2. Re:Want to confirm? Look at your bittorrent log. by phantomcircuit · · Score: 4, Informative

      The checksum used by TCP is several orders of magnitude more likely to match a corrupted packet than the checksum used by bittorrent. (citation)

      More than likely these are transmission errors where the TCP checksum matched but the bittorrent checksum did not.

  10. Radiation Effects by Maximum+Prophet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At Purdue, many years ago, one of the engineers mapped the ECC RAM errors in a room with hundreds of sparc stations and found that it was mostly in a cone shape pointed toward the window. That window looked out to a pile of coal, so the culprit was assumed to be low level alpha radiation.

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    All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
  11. clearly not a radiation engineer by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That window looked out to a pile of coal, so the culprit was assumed to be low level alpha radiation.

    Alpha radiation is stopped by a sheet of office paper. It certainly wouldn't make it through the window, through the machine case, electromagnetic shield, circuit board, chip case, and into the silicon. Even beta radiation would be unlikely to make it that far.

    What is much more likely: thermal effects. IE, infrared from the sun heating up machines near the window.

    --
    Please help metamoderate.
  12. Difficult to find parts that support ECC by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When I was building the computer I'm typing this on, I had the grand idea of building it with so much RAM that I could basically work from RAM. Meaning, for example, that all my running programs and the project I was working on would have to fit in RAM.

    Of course, with such a dream, I was concerned about the reliability of my memory. So I wanted ECC. I found out that having ECC memory is not just a matter of buying ECC memory. There are different kinds of ECC memory, and you need to find a combination of memory, motherboard, and CPU that works together. Many sites that offer CPUs and/or motherboards don't list support for ECC among the specifications. Searching for it is difficult, because searching for "ECC" also returns hits for things like "non-ECC" and "ECC: no".

    Finally, I found a combination of motherboard and CPU that would support unbuffered ECC DDR2, and a matching pair of memory modules to go with it. And then, when I got all the parts, the RAM didn't fit in the motherboard. Turns out the RAM was FB-DIMM, which had not been listed in the advertisement. I gave up and just bought 2GB of non-ECC RAM to just get the system working. The FB-DIMM (all 8GB of it) is still sitting here, because I haven't found anyone who wants to buy it from me.

    Lessons learned: 1. The saying "the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from" is still relevant. I don't know why there have to be so many hardware interfaces to memory chips, but there are, so be careful. 2. Apparently, nobody really cares about ECC RAM, otherwise information would be easier to find. 3. Apparently, AMD CPUs and matching motherboards more usually support ECC RAM than Intel parts and matching motherboards.

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.