Is there a service I can run which will automatically test CPU/RAM/hardware in the background?

Question

Is there any service which runs in the background, and does the job of prime95 (i.e. it tests server CPU/RAM for integrity now and again)?

Regards, Shane.

p.s. The reason I ask: we recently had some bad RAM on our server, which ended up slowly corrupting all of our business files. A file would be copied into memory, it would be corrupted in RAM, and copied back onto the RAID 1 hard drive in a corrupted state.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 31 '09 at 23:10

That's why you pay the big bucks for ECC RAM and RAM mirroring on tier 1 servers...

It's an intriguing idea though to test the RAM like a SAN tests it's hard drives. Can't say I've ever heard of such a piece of software though. Sorry.

The Windows Memory Tester included with Vista and above is pretty decent though, I prefer it to MemTest+ these days, mainly because it's easier to read its progress reports. I do run it against every new machine we get for at least 24 hours. While it has not found any errors on servers it has found bad RAM sticks on 3 developer workstations that were experiencing unexplained BSODs, swapping the RAM out solved their problems.

+1 for ECC - I never run a critical server without it – Mark Henderson Dec 31 '09 at 23:28 — Mark Henderson, Dec 31 '09 at 23:28
In my view ECC in one of the things that define a server. – John Gardeniers Jan 01 '10 at 04:13 — John Gardeniers, Jan 01 '10 at 04:13

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 03 '09 at 00:01

While testing the CPU and RAM sounds like a good idea, I would argue that you need a hardware level monitoring tool that can monitor the hardware on a continuous, real time basis. Dell has DOMSA, HP and IBM have their own products and there are third party products available.

Is there a service I can run which will automatically test CPU/RAM/hardware in the background?

2 Answers2