Wondering why your computer just crashed again? Its memory might be to blame, according to real-world Google research that finds error rates higher than what earlier work showed. With hundreds of thousands of computers in its data centers, Google can collect an abundance of real-world data about how those machines actually work. That's exactly what the company did for a research paper that found error rates are surprisingly high. <\/p>\n
\n“We found the incidence of memory errors and the range of error rates across different DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) to be much higher than previously reported,” according the paper jointly written by Bianca Schroeder, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Google's Eduardo Pinheiro and Wolf-Dietrich Weber. “Memory errors are not rare events.” How many errors? On average, about one in three Google servers experienced a correctable memory error each year and one in a hundred an uncorrectable error, an event that typically causes a crash. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wondering why your computer just crashed again? Its memory might be to blame, according to real-world Google research that finds error rates higher than what earlier work showed. With hundreds of thousands of computers in its data centers, Google can collect an abundance of real-world data about how those machines actually work. That's exactly what the company did for a research paper that found error rates are surprisingly high. <\/p>\n
\n“We found the incidence of memory errors and the range of error rates across different DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) to be much higher than previously reported,” according the paper jointly written by Bianca Schroeder, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Google's Eduardo Pinheiro and Wolf-Dietrich Weber. “Memory errors are not rare events.” How many errors? On average, about one in three Google servers experienced a correctable memory error each year and one in a hundred an uncorrectable error, an event that typically causes a crash. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n