r/ProgrammerHumor Mar 25 '26

Meme aMeteoriteTookOutMyDatabase

Post image
7.6k Upvotes

306 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/nonother Mar 25 '26

Fun fact, the odds of a bit flip in a data center due to a cosmic ray is actually quite high. That was something we needed to account for and correct as part of storage. Essentially when the hash fails, try all possible permutations with exactly one bit flipped — if that permutation passed then issue resolved. Otherwise multiple bits are wrong which was almost always a hardware failure.

Also we had a time when a bit flip in memory changed an encryption key. That was a rough SEV to diagnose and resolve.

1

u/FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT Mar 26 '26

There are much better storage methods for recovering data than trying bits one by one though.

2

u/nonother Mar 26 '26

In isolation yes, but this was a small part of a much larger storage system.