A python program that I'm building was used to die for no apparent reason. I couldn't figure out the reason, so my workaround was to add few lines that write the time to a 'vitality' file every time a certain line within the program is executed, which happens about every 0.1 seconds.
A separate script reads the 'vitality' file every 1 second, and when the vital sign doesn't update for, say 10 seconds, the script kills the program and restarts it.
So far this workaround has been working great on the original problem, but now I'm rather concerned if the SSD will degrade by this or not.
Does writing 10 digits of unixtimestamp every 0.1s to a file have negligible effect on SSD health, or would it degrade the SSD fast?
Doing that will degrade the SSD and destroy it over time.
In my last job, the SSD health tool (smartctl) indicated that the 15 SSDs in our cluster product were wearing rapidly and had only months of life left. The team found that a third party software package (etcd) was syncing a small amounts of data to a filesystem on SSD once per second. And each sync wrote at least an entire 16K block. Luckily, the problem was found early enough that we could patch it in a software update before suffering too many customer returns.
Write the 'vitality' file somewhere else. It could be on a tmpfs like /var/run/user/. Or use a different vitality mechanism; something like supervisord can manage your task, run health checks and restart it on failure.