What is the memtester tool called here?

[drosophila]

The usual way of booting memtest86+ is highly disruptive, so it would be nice to have a tool like memtester that could be run during normal operation, maybe even scheduled monthly runs, since memory issues can develop over time so monitoring might be good. The plugins section doesn't provide anything of that sort/name so what am I overlooking?

[Mpegger]

... so what am I overlooking?

For the same reason a program like badblocks can't test a drive that is mounted and in use, memtest can't test RAM while it's in use by anything other then itself.

memtester will malloc(3) the amount of memory specified, if possible. If this fails, it will decrease the amount of memory requested until it succeeds. It will then attempt to mlock(3) this memory; if it cannot do so, testing will be slower and much less effective. Run memtester as root so that it can mlock the memory it tests

[connervt]

What would be the benefit of running memtest86+ if it cannot test all of the installed memory?  Only testing a portion of your memory does not give you any conclusive result.  And avoiding memory used by the system/OS is even less valuable, for this would be the area which you would really wish to know if there is an issue.

[drosophila]

I know that it can only test the memory that is not in use. That is an obvious drawback of running on a live system. And just like badblock-testing only a portion of the harddrive, it will catch more errors than not running any test at all. Especially errors that affect the entire module, like a failing connection or a short will produce. It will obviously not catch individual cell damage. However, it will catch sporadic errors, like those from marginal voltage regulation even more likely than running memtest for only one or two tests because it can run for longer because there will not be any downtime. Like badblock testing parts of a harddrive will catch things like failing head-amps, alignment problems and other stuff that affects the operation of the entire drive, and since these things tend to spread, even if it won't catch them necessarily immediately, it will probably catch them before the system becomes unreliable and even if not give you an indication. Memtest86+ will also not catch all memory issues, so the same argument could be made: "why test at all if it won't catch 100% of all errors"...

Running some test will always result in catching more errors than running no test, and that is the entire point. So, thanks for the responses but my question remains unanswered. So this probably means that this tool is not included.