On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:24 AM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
John, just cause the machines we use to serve web content to our clients doesn't use the grade of equipment you prefer to use, and can afford, doesn't mean equipment that other people use is inferior, or worthless.
ECC memory would have caught any memory errors, (including memory timing), and give a diagnostic and we wouldn't be having this conversation, this system would be in production, and you'd be working on the next customers job.
oh yeah, those 'server' motherboards generally use registered/buffered memory, which can handle higher memory fanouts and support a full load of memory banks robustly.
I meant to suggest the other night, go into the Intel BIOS, find the memory settings area, and set it to custom timings, and add a clock to each of the timings, like if its 4-4-4-12, try 5-5-5-15 (or whatever the next increment is). running 8GB on a desktop board, I'm guessing you have all slots full, this increseas the capacitive load on the address and data bus, and makes marginal timing more marginal.
John, I know what ECC does. I have 2 Dell PE860 servers with 8GB ECC DDRII RAM as well, and they're both giving RAM problems. I had top swap-out the RAM 2 times with the suppliers already, and swapped out a motherboard on the one of the servers. Honestly, ECC isn't my favourate to use.
At the same time, I have about 8 servers with cheap Gigabyte motherboards and non-ECC RAM, which have been running for close to 4 years now, without any hickups at all.
It's the first time I try the Intel board, since it's supposed to be a step-up from the desktop boards, and has 4 memory slots as apposed to only 2.
The server had the same problems when I only had 4GBM RAM (2 slots used & 2 slots open), so I don't think that the capacitive load is the problem here. Right now the server is still at the datacentre - which is 2 hours drive there & back with traffic, so I'm going to get it later today / tonight, as soon as I've moved all the data across to the slower gigabyte server, and then I can try the RAM timings thing in the BIOS.
But, how can I put a LOT of load onto it, and see what's causing the problem? For all I know, the motherboard could be faulty, or the CPU, or maybe even the SATA bus?