> relatively rare, especially on good quality servers
Good quality servers are the top of the reliability standings. The bottom... the bottom is very far down. Very far.
I'm a hardware guy now. I'm still amazed anything ever works at all. The worst are things like DDR SDRAM that work well enough that people think they can get away without error detection. At least modern MLC NAND flash is so bad that it obviously doesn't work at all without ECC. Better that than silent failures.
The first Guild Wars game actually added a Prime95-style iteration before sending a bug report/crash dump back. An astonishing number of clients failed this test; if I'm remembering the conversation I had correctly, something like half of all oddball crashes got filtered out by that test. Half! (To be fair, overclocked cheap gaming machines may actually be the bottom tier of reliability, but the point stands.)
Good quality servers are the top of the reliability standings. The bottom... the bottom is very far down. Very far.
I'm a hardware guy now. I'm still amazed anything ever works at all. The worst are things like DDR SDRAM that work well enough that people think they can get away without error detection. At least modern MLC NAND flash is so bad that it obviously doesn't work at all without ECC. Better that than silent failures.
The first Guild Wars game actually added a Prime95-style iteration before sending a bug report/crash dump back. An astonishing number of clients failed this test; if I'm remembering the conversation I had correctly, something like half of all oddball crashes got filtered out by that test. Half! (To be fair, overclocked cheap gaming machines may actually be the bottom tier of reliability, but the point stands.)