OT: ECC Memory - WAS: Re: [Samba] Possible Filesystem Corruption with Samba 3.0.25a (with XFS and LVM)

[John Drescher]

> I recall reading somewhere that ECC memory was considerably slower than
> non-ECC, and its benefits was mostly sales hype - ie, its ECC was not
> precisely reliable...
>
Neither are true.

> Anyone know of an authoritative answer to this question?
>
I use ECC memory in all of my servers and the main benefit is that if
you ever get a single correction   you probably have a hardware
problem. On these systems machine check exceptions are logged in the
bios for each memory problem seen. If you see more than one of these
it is highly likely that your hardware is the problem.  If you have
the correct hardware and your kernel has the CONFIG_X86_MCE and
CONFIG_X86_MCE_INTEL or CONFIG_X86_MCE_AMD you should be able to view
these errors on a running system by executing mcelog.

John