ECC matters
I beg this, every time this conversation comes up it’s the same answer “I don’t see a problem”.<p>It’s so easy to chalk these kind of errors to other issues, a little corruption here, a running program goes bezerk there- could be a buggy program or a little accidental memory overwrite. Reboot will fix it.<p>But I ran many thousands of physical machines, petabytes of RAM, I tracked memory flip errors and they were _common_; common even in: less dense memory, in thick metal enclosures surrounded by mesh. Where density and shielding impacts bitflips a lot.<p>My own experience tracking bitflips across my fleet led me to buy a Xeon laptop with ECC memory (precision 5520) and it has (anecdotally) been significantly more reliable than my desktop.