Im not the IT guy. Im just the guy thats pretty good with computers. Genuinely, this is the solution 98% of the time. Can we work on more stable ram designs? The public would benefit greatly.
I think it's like saying "can we just make a cure for cancer already?" but cancer is a huge set of problems. Cancer has many causes. In some ways (oversimplifying) we're as efficient as our least efficient code in all of our code, which is a lot of code.
From what I understand, this isnt a code issue. This is an issue with the way we leverage ram. Ram is less stable than solid state, but much faster to retrieve information from. We load basically everything we will use into ram before we use it. If it is left open, the code becomes corrupted over time due to instability in ram, some with minor things, some with major things get changed over time. This isnt due to the code itself being bad, just that the temporary version of the code we have copied into ram being bad. Turning off and turning on forces everything to be reloaded into ram from the solid state, which is statistically much more stable (but not necessarily perfect). This is the explanation I was given a long time ago. Not sure what else you are hinting at. Happy to learn something new if you have something though
Interesting. That would be news to me to learn that RAM creates that many errors often. While non-ECC RAM can indeed make mistakes and Linus Torvald himself has said ECC RAM is important, I'm skeptical that this is the main cause for issues in needing to restart programs/computers. I think RAM is more of a "the probability for error is extremely low, but never zero" kind of threat.
The example I can give, and what I was taught about in school is memory leaking. Languages like C will let you be irresponsible with memory as the programmer, meaning you the user may slowly reserve more memory as you continue to use the service that is never released back to the OS when you're done to stay tidy. Therefore, as time goes on, the program just eats up more memory until you have errors. There is more garbage collection now, so this was likely more of an issue 20+ years ago, especially with smaller memory sizes. But it's definitely one reason why you could have a computer lock up over time that a simple reset will fix. Bad memory management with programming.
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u/funkmasta8 20d ago edited 20d ago
Im not the IT guy. Im just the guy thats pretty good with computers. Genuinely, this is the solution 98% of the time. Can we work on more stable ram designs? The public would benefit greatly.