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Why use ECC? (2015)

Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory. My read is that his major points are: - Google didn't use ECC when they built their servers in 1999 - Most RAM errors are hard errors and not soft errors - RAM errors are rare because hardware has improved - If ECC were actually important, it would be used everywhere and not just servers.

When Google used servers without ECC back in 1999, they found a number of symptoms that were ultimately due to memory corruption, including a search index that returned effectively random results to queries. Anyway, after completing the analysis, we found that memtest couldn't detect any problems, but that replacing the RAM on the bad machines caused a one to two order of magnitude reduction in error rate. Most home users don't mind, giving hardware vendors a mechanism to extract more money out of people who buy servers while still providing cheap parts for consumers.

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