Rust would fix this. Oh wait.
10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
311–320 of 495 posts
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#312Firefox is about the only piece of software in my setup that occasionally crashes. I say "occasionally" for lack of a better word, it's not "all the time", but it is definitely more than I would want to. If that was caused by bad memory, I would expect other software to be similarly affected and hence crash with about comparable frequency. However, it looks like I'm falling more into the other 90% of cases (unsurpris…
Of course, nobody is claiming that there aren't lots of Firefox crashes which are caused by bugs in Firefox. Quite the opposite, based on these figures. What people find interesting is that the amount they're suspecting are down to hardware faults is way higher than most people would have expected.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#313I guess the percentage of crashes due to hardware is high because people with faulty hardware are experiencing the vast majority of crashes. It sounds kind of dumb when put like that, I'm actually surprised it's that low a percentage.
I guess the percentage of crashes due to hardware is high because people with faulty hardware are experiencing the vast majority of crashes.
It is not that simple, it does not only depend on the hardware but also the code. It is like a race, what happens first - you hit a bug in the code or your hardware glitches? If the code is bug free, then all crashes will be due to hardware issues, whether faulty hardware or stray particles from the sun. When the code is one giant bug and crashes immediately every time, then you will need really faulty hardware or have to place a uranium rod on top of your RAM and point a heat gun at your CPU to crash before you hit the first bug, i.e. almost all crashes will be due to bugs.
So what you observe will depend on the prevalence of faulty hardware and how long it takes to hit an hardware issue vs how buggy the code is and how long it takes to hit a bug.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#314I've told this story before on HN, but my biz partner at ArenaNet, Mike O'Brien (creator of battle.net) wrote a system in Guild Wars circa 2004 that detected bitflips as part of our bug triage process, because we'd regularly get bug reports from game clients that made no sense. Every frame (i.e. ~60FPS) Guild Wars would allocate random memory, run math-heavy computations, and compare the results with a table of known…
> Several years later I learned that Dell computers had larger-than-reasonable analog component problems because Dell sourced the absolute cheapest stuff for their computers; I expect that was also a cause. Case in point: I was getting memory errors on my gaming machine, that persisted even after replacing the sticks. It caused windows bluesreen maybe once a month so I kinda lived with it as I couldn't afford to repl…
I'm surprised "faulty PSU" is not on GP's list of common problems. Almost every unstable computer I've ever experienced has been due to either a dying PSU (not an under-specced one) or dying power conversion capacitors on the motherboard.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
GW1 was my childhood. The MMO with no monthly fees appealed to my Mom and I met friends for years. The 8 skill build system was genius, as was the cut scenes featuring your player character. If there's ever a 3rd game I would love to see something allowing for more expression through build creation though I could see how that's hard to balance.
Didn't they launch a remake of gw1 recently. Maybe I can get my kids hooked on that instead of this Roblox crap.
Yes they did, but the social bump that was there shortly after release has significantly calmed down already.
It did rekindle my love for the game, but most outposts are empty, even in the international districts, so I think it's hard to get hooked on it for new joiners.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why ECC memory is not the norm these days. It is only slightly more expensive, but solves all these problems. Some consumer mainboards even support it already.
Why? Intel making and keeping it workstation/Xeon-exclusive for a premium for too long. And AMD is still playing along not forcing the issue with their weird "yeah, Zen supports it, but your mainboard may or may not, no idea, don't care, do your own research" stance. These days it's a chicken and egg problem re: price and availability and demand. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29838403
Maybe it's high time for some regulation?
E.g. EU enforced mandatory USB-C charging from 2025, and pushes for ending production of combustion engine cars by 2035. Why not just make ECC RAM mandatory in new computers starting e.g. from 2030?
AMD is already one step away from being compliant. So, it's not an outlandish requirement. And regulating will also force Intel to cut their BS, or risk losing the market.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#317I've written genetic programming experiments that do not require an explicit mutation operator because the machine would tend to flip bits in the candidate genomes under the heavy system load. It took me a solid week to determine that I didn't actually have a bug in my code. It happens so fast on my machine (when it's properly loaded) that I can depend on it to some extent.
Hyrum's law in action.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#318I've told this story before on HN, but my biz partner at ArenaNet, Mike O'Brien (creator of battle.net) wrote a system in Guild Wars circa 2004 that detected bitflips as part of our bug triage process, because we'd regularly get bug reports from game clients that made no sense. Every frame (i.e. ~60FPS) Guild Wars would allocate random memory, run math-heavy computations, and compare the results with a table of known…
I don't understand why ECC memory is not the norm these days. It is only slightly more expensive, but solves all these problems. Some consumer mainboards even support it already.
What I'm wondering, even without ECC, afaik standard ram still has a parity bit, so a single flip should be detected. With ECC it would be fixed, without ECC it would crash the system. For it to get through and cause an app to malfunction you need two bit flips at least.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#319Firefox is about the only piece of software in my setup that occasionally crashes. I say "occasionally" for lack of a better word, it's not "all the time", but it is definitely more than I would want to. If that was caused by bad memory, I would expect other software to be similarly affected and hence crash with about comparable frequency. However, it looks like I'm falling more into the other 90% of cases (unsurpris…
The most frequent crashes I have with Firefox are when I type in a text area (such as this one right now, or on Reddit, for example). The longer the text I type is, the more probable it is that it's going to crash. Or maybe it doesn't crash, just grinds to such a slow pace that it is equivalent to a crash.
My suspicion has always been some kind of a memory leak, but memory corruption also makes sense.
Unfortunately, Chrome (which I use for work - Firefox is for private stuff) has NEVER crashed on me yet. Certainly not in the past 5 years. Which is odd. I'm on Linux btw.