Memory errors harmful?

[Ralph Grothe]

Hello,

there is a N4000-55 of ours, bought as used, where cstm reports memory errors at 4 page addresses (please, have a look at attachment).

I was so unwise to give away this detail to the customer, who now thinks his application's overall performance will be impaired significantly.
I soothed these worries by telling that only 4 KB mem pages were involved, and that the CPUs will mark these addresses as unallocatable anyway, so that only 4 KB of 2 GB RAM will be lost which wouldn't justify an exchange of SIMMs.

Now I wonder if this wasn't a bit too presumptious?

Regards

Ralph

[Stefan Farrelly · Accepted solution]

These memory errors arent anything to worry about. As you noted, the system deallocates the pages anyway which makes a tiny bit less memory available which will have no impact. I would only worry about these errors if you keep getting them, ie. every week or so.

Weve had them before recently on L's and N's and all we did was next time we had scheduled maintenance we removed the SIMMS, reseated (reinserted) them, cleared the PDT log (so all memory now available) and all our memory errors went away. These sort of errors almost never mean you have a faulty memory SIMM - IMHO.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Ralph,

Yes it should not be a problem UNLESS a page is low enough in address space to cause a kernel load problem at next boot. But I'd still follow Stefan's advice at next maint window and reseat the DIMMs.

BTW - since it's deallocated 4 pages, you're actually losing 16 KB. But that's still a very tiny loss.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Ralph Grothe]

Stefan, Jeff,

thank you for your reassuring replies.

Of course did I mean 16 KB (viz. 4 * 4 KB ;-)

Well, I'm not so sure about the SIMM reseating issue.

Stefan, it sounds as if you guys are doing such things yourself.

Although, I'd find out how to unsrcew the chassis, and reinserting cards there doesn't seem to differ much from tampering with SIMMs in your PC at home, I wouldn't want to do this myself for not risking to lose any warranty at all.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi (again) Ralph,

I can certainly understand you trepidation at doing the reseating yourself.
IF you still have warranty or HW maint on this system then have HP come out to do the reseat or even replace the modules.
Just schedule them for your window time.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Stefan Farrelly]

Hi Ralph,

sorry, didnt want to suggest reseating memory youself but an engineer do it. Ive completed my HP engineering course many yarns ago so I know how to do it, sorry.

Cheers,

Stefan
HPO
HP UK