Anybody testing the reliability of computers ?

Hello,

I worry sometimes about cosmic interference or electric magnetic interference or just mobile energy signal interference with computers.

Is anybody measuring "rate of computer crashes" ?

It will be hard to do because the computer industry changes all the time.

New software, new hardware, according to Balmer to only constant is change.

If nobody is measuring the reliability of computer systems then I can recommend the following:

  1. Build a computer

  1. Install software.

  2. Let it run forever.

  1. Don't change a thing, except when hardware breaks.

Then during all of this:

Try to measure two things:

  1. Rate of failure/system crashes.

  1. Rate of freezes/hangs.

Perhaps it's already to late to start this measurement, however better late than never.

Nowadays the world full with mobile phones and mobile signals.

It would be interesting to see if there is a sudden change in rate failures or freezes.

For intel or amd or any other processor manufacturer and also hardware producers it could be interesting to measure these failure rates.

And perhaps try and design computer chips which will fail less and be more tolerant towards these kinds of external sources of interference.

To have a competive edge over competitors.

It may even save your life on day. Perhaps you will be onboard a flight/plane and if it's computers fail you may die if not you may life another day.

Bye, Skybuck.

Reply to
Skybuck Flying
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Jeanne Tripplehorn is like a triceratops. She has three horns!

Reply to
Piltdown Man

Wear a tin-foil hat, it will do you good

Reply to
Klaus Kragelund

Actually, it is well known that a tin-foil hat will create a resonant cavity that will electromagnetically shield your computer from any interference

Reply to
Klaus Kragelund

Lifespan testing is a big deal with many products. There is a whole field devoted to it. It even covers medical treatments, as humans live too long to get good data directly. For plastics and paints, there is a "weatherometer." It's a box that has high UV and temperature. Xenon arc is typical. 1000 suns. The main way you're going to get data on a computer is to speed aging by raising the temperature and maybe humidity. So put that PC at 180 F! Of course, you can run SW at same time. That's about the limits of what you can do, and it is done in many product areas by 100,000 techs all the time.

Reply to
haiticare2011

...

The other way is to test a very large number of devices under similar conditions.

Have a look at "DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study" and "Failure trends in a large disk drive population" both published by Google.

If you care about your data

1) Use ECC memory in your computer 2) Don't overclock 3) Keep regular, tested backups

John

Reply to
jrwalliker

We just count your posts and figure a 1:1 relationship to failures.

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Reply to
Paul Hovnanian P.E.

I run Linux on all my desktops. My desktop at work ran once for over 400 days before we had a power failure. Recently we had a power failure there, so the uptime as of today is just 50 days.

I run a web store at home, also on Linux. I have had that system run over 180 days at a stretch, and that is with hackers constantly trying to break in. That machine did reboot for no reason I could find a few weeks ago, first time I've seen that in a long time. But, it might have been a power glitch, a few other things got reset at the same time.

I run some Windows CAD software on the Linux machines with VMware, using either Win 2K or XP, and these also seem to be more relaible in the virtual environment than on real hardware. I have had Win 2K run for several months before needing to reboot.

None of these machines has a UPS, either. These are all Dell Optiplex or Precision desktop machines, the Dell commercial-grade PC line, not the consumer grade ones.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

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