> Memory will have random bit flips but I think they are pretty randomly distributed (or maybe catastrophic if there is some cosmic event)
Cosmic rays cause random bit flips, sure.
However, DIMMs going bad results in the same areas corrupting over and over. If you've run memtest or such with bad DIMMs, you'll see it telling you exactly which DIMM is bad, etc.
Now, dynamic memory management and virtual memory mapped onto physical memory complicate that picture... but you could easily end up with a single buffer used for e.g. TCP receive that lives in the same physical RAM region for the lifetime of the process.
Similarly, firmware bugs have resulted in very deterministic corruptions.
Cosmic rays cause random bit flips, sure.
However, DIMMs going bad results in the same areas corrupting over and over. If you've run memtest or such with bad DIMMs, you'll see it telling you exactly which DIMM is bad, etc.
Now, dynamic memory management and virtual memory mapped onto physical memory complicate that picture... but you could easily end up with a single buffer used for e.g. TCP receive that lives in the same physical RAM region for the lifetime of the process.
Similarly, firmware bugs have resulted in very deterministic corruptions.