This thread has gone way off the rails. Can you please take it
somewhere else? It's pretty wildly off topic for this list at
this point.
Thanks.
On Mon, Nov 06, 2017 at 04:56:18PM -0800, Jeff Gilbert wrote:
My understanding of current policy is that ECC is not required. (and
not even an option with MacBook Pros) Given the volume of development
that happens unhindered on our developers' many, many non-ECC
machines, I believe the burden of proof-of-burden is on the pro-ECC
argument to show that it's likely to be a worthwhile investment for
our use-cases.
As for evidence for lack of ECC being a non-issue, I call to witness
the vast majority of Firefox development, most applicably that portion
done in the last ten years, and especially all MacOS development
excluding the very few Mac Pros we have.
If we've given developers ECC machines already when non-ECC was an
option, absent a positive request for ECC from the developer, I would
consider this to have been a minor mistake.
On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 3:03 PM, Gabriele Svelto <gsve...@mozilla.com> wrote:
On 06/11/2017 22:44, Jeff Gilbert wrote:
Price matters, since every dollar we spend chasing ECC would be a
dollar we can't allocate towards perf improvements, hardware refresh
rate, or simply more machines for any build clusters we may want.
And every day our developers or IT staff waste chasing apparently random
issues is a waste of both money and time.
The paper linked above addresses massive compute clusters, which seems
to have limited implications for our use-cases.
The clusters are 6000 and 8500 nodes respectively, quite small by
today's standards. How many developers do we have? Hundreds for sure, it
could be a thousand looking at our current headcount so we're in the
same ballpark.
Nearly every machine we do development on does not currently use ECC.
I don't see why that should change now.
Not true. The current Xeon E5-based ThinkStation P710 available from
Service Now has ECC memory and so did the previous models in the last
five years. Having a workstation available w/o ECC would actually be a
step backwards.
To me, ECC for desktop compute
workloads crosses the line into jumping at shadows, since "restart
your machine slightly more often than otherwise" is not onerous.
Do you have data to prove that this is not an issue?
Gabriele
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