Usually, ECC memory maintains a memory system immune to single-bit errors: the information that's learn from each word is at all times the same as the info that had been written to it, even when one of the bits really stored has been flipped to the flawed state. Most non-ECC Memory Wave Program cannot detect errors, although some non-ECC memory with parity assist allows detection however not correction. ECC memory is utilized in most computer systems the place information corruption can't be tolerated, like industrial management applications, crucial databases, and infrastructural memory caches. Error correction codes protect against undetected information corruption and are used in computers where such corruption is unacceptable, examples being scientific and monetary computing purposes, or in database and file servers. ECC may also reduce the number of crashes in multi-consumer server purposes and most-availability systems. Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system could cause a single bit of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to spontaneously flip to the alternative state.

It was initially thought that this was primarily attributable to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, however research has proven that almost all of one-off soft errors in DRAM chips occur because of background radiation, mainly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries, which can change the contents of a number of memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to learn or write to them. Hence, the error Memory Wave Program rates increase rapidly with rising altitude; for example, Memory Wave compared to sea level, the speed of neutron flux is 3.5 instances larger at 1.5 km and 300 occasions higher at 10-12 km (the cruising altitude of economic airplanes). Consequently, systems operating at high altitudes require special provisions for reliability. For example, the spacecraft Cassini-Huygens, launched in 1997, contained two equivalent flight recorders, every with 2.5 gigabits of memory in the form of arrays of business DRAM chips. As a consequence of built-in EDAC functionality, the spacecraft's engineering telemetry reported the variety of (correctable) single-bit-per-word errors and (uncorrectable) double-bit-per-phrase errors.

During the primary 2.5 years of flight, the spacecraft reported a almost constant single-bit error fee of about 280 errors per day. Nonetheless, on November 6, 1997, throughout the first month in house, the number of errors elevated by greater than a factor of four on that single day. There was some concern that as DRAM density increases additional, and thus the elements on chips get smaller, while operating voltages continue to fall, DRAM chips will be affected by such radiation extra regularly, since decrease-power particles can be ready to change a memory cell's state. Alternatively, smaller cells make smaller targets, and moves to technologies reminiscent of SOI may make individual cells less vulnerable and so counteract, or even reverse, this trend. Work printed between 2007 and 2009 showed extensively varying error rates with over 7 orders of magnitude difference, starting from 10−10 error/(bit·h), roughly one bit error per hour per gigabyte of memory, to 10−17 error/(bit·h), roughly one bit error per millennium per gigabyte of memory.

A big-scale research based mostly on Google's very giant number of servers was offered on the SIGMETRICS/Efficiency '09 convention. The actual error charge discovered was a number of orders of magnitude larger than the earlier small-scale or laboratory research, with between 25,000 (2.5×10−11 error/(bit·h)) and 70,000 (7.0×10−11 error/(bit·h), or 1 bit error per gigabyte of RAM per 1.Eight hours) errors per billion gadget hours per megabit. More than 8% of DIMM memory modules were affected by errors per year. The consequence of a memory error Memory Wave is system-dependent. In methods without ECC, an error can lead both to a crash or to corruption of data; in massive-scale production websites, memory errors are some of the-frequent hardware causes of machine crashes. Memory errors could cause safety vulnerabilities. A memory error can have no consequences if it adjustments a bit which neither causes observable malfunctioning nor affects knowledge used in calculations or saved. A 2010 simulation examine showed that, for a web browser, solely a small fraction of memory errors induced data corruption, although, as many memory errors are intermittent and correlated, the effects of memory errors have been greater than could be anticipated for independent tender errors.