memtest delenda est

Ok … maybe not so much destroyed. More like “ignored as a reasonable test of anything but DIMM visibility, and very basic functionality”. Memtest has several variants running around, all of which purport to hammer on, and detect, bad RAM. The only problem is, it doesn’t really work well, apart from trivial cases. That is, if you have an iffy ram, you’d need days/weeks/months of testing with this code rather than putting it in a box and running a hard pounding code on it. We noted this some years ago, and largely stopped using it. Recently had someone yank a DIMM and try it with memtest. Passed memtest. Well, the DIMM is probably bad, and we are getting them to retest the way we need them to retest … differential diagnoses are terribly important for systems … it can help you isolate problems rapidly, by zeroing in on a failed subsystem, and eliminating alternatives. Without it, you are left asking whether or not your test which gave a “pass” is in fact valid, correct, or even relevant. When you test, you need to reduce impact of additional dimensions, additional variables. Memtest doesn’t quite do this. Careful differential diagnostics does.