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10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

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Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#11

Post by NotGMan »

>> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects!

I find this impossible to believe.

If this were so all devs for apps, games, etc... would be talking about this but since this is the first time I'm hearing about this I'm seriously doubting this.

>> This is a bit skewed because users with flaky hardware will crash more often than users with functioning machines, but even then this dwarfs all the previous estimates I saw regarding this problem.

Might be the case, but 10% is still huge.

There imo has to be something else going on. Either their userbase/tracking is biased or something else...

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#12

Post by titaniumtravel »

kmoser wrote: post #7

The next logical step would be to somehow inform users so they could take action to replace the bad memory. I realize this is a challenge given the anonymized nature of the crash data, but I might be willing to trade some anonymity in exchange for stability.

The easy solution for that is to just do that analysis locally... Firefox doesn't submit the full core dumps anyhow for this exact reason and therefore needs to do some preprocessing in any case.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#15

Post by titaniumtravel »

nubinetwork wrote: post #13

470k crashes in a week? Considering how low their market share is, that would suggest every install crashes several times a day... I gotta call bs.

Based on what data? According to their reporting they have around 200 Million monthly users, which seems compatible with 470k crashes a week? See https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity>

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#16

Post by vizzier »

nubinetwork wrote: post #13

470k crashes in a week? Considering how low their market share is, that would suggest every install crashes several times a day... I gotta call bs.

For my part I'm not sure I recall a crash having daily driven firefox in quite some time. I'd suspect that the large number of bit errors might be driven by a small number of poor hardware clients.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#17

Post by vizzier »

vsgherzi wrote: post #8

is there a way to get the memory tester he mentioned? Is it open source? Once Ram goes bad is there a way or recovering it or is it toasted forever?

https://www.memtest86.com/

Errors may be caused by bad seating/contact in the slots or failing memory controllers (generally on the CPU nowadays) but if you have bad sticks they're generally done for.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#18

Post by nubinetwork »

titaniumtravel wrote: post #15
nubinetwork wrote: post #13

470k crashes in a week? Considering how low their market share is, that would suggest every install crashes several times a day... I gotta call bs.

Based on what data? According to their reporting they have around 200 Million monthly users, which seems compatible with 470k crashes a week? See https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity >

2% worldwide? https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Granted, they're probably just as accurate as netcraft. /shrug

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#19

Post by titaniumtravel »

nubinetwork wrote: post #18
titaniumtravel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what data? According to their reporting they have around 200 Million monthly users, which seems compatible with 470k crashes a week? See https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity >

2% worldwide? https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Granted, they're probably just as accurate as netcraft. /shrug

The nuance here is of cause that there are a bunch of people using multiple browsers. Also I mean there are a lot of people using browsers on the world
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