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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

#381

Post by RealityVoid »

Agingcoder wrote: post #248
Helmut10001 wrote: post #207

Earlier 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.

No it doesn’t :-) I’ve had plenty of servers with faulty ecc dimms that didn’t trigger , and would only show faults when actual memory testing. I had a hard time convincing some of our admins the first time ( ‘no ecc faults you can’t be right ‘ ) but I won the bet. Edit: very old paper by google on these topics. My issues were 6-7 years ago probably. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

I'm sorry, but I, just like your admins, don't believe this. It's theoretically possible to have "undetectable" errors, but it's very unlikely and you'd see a much higher than this incidence of detected unrecoverable errors and you'd see a much higher incidence than this of repaired errors. I just don't buy the argument of "invisible errors".

EDIT: took a look on the paper you linked and it basically says the same thing I did. The probability of these cases becomes increasingly and increasingly small and while ECC would indeed, not reduce it to _zero_ it would greatly greatly reduce it.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#382

Post by bergheim »

Strange. I have a tab hoarding problem, I often have over 1000 tabs open [1][2], and I cannot remember the last time Firefox crashed. I'm thinking it must have been years? I use ublock origin though, which might help since ads do their best to steal your computer and soul through any means possible of course.

I also use a bunch of other extensions though, dark reader, vimium, sideberry... I'd expect me to be a bit more exposed than the average user. Yet it's just rock stable for me. Maybe it just works better on linux?

1: I know this because I installed https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-counter-p... to check :)

2: However after finding Karakeep I don't actually have 1000 tabs anymore!

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#383

Post by quesera »

stnvh wrote: post #359
quesera wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Describe "demons"? I run four Firefox instances simultaneously, most of the time. No issues to report.

Long hangs / never closes, crash report screen triggers often. macOS. This occurs for me when launching instances from the about:profiles page and using each instance for what I'd describe as normal use

I see. Yeah, I've seen this.

It seems more likely to happen when the profile has been running for a long time (a couple weeks?) and/or using a large amount of RAM.

There's a 60-secish timeout before it gives up and pops that crash report window. I don't think it's a crash per se, just an unresolved file lock or similar. I haven't noticed whether there's any relationship to running multiple profiles. I am almost always running several at a time, and the issue only occurs sometimes. It has no (other) negative side effects, as far as I can tell, but it was unsettling at first.

I'm on macOS also, and I launch from the command line (effectively, I actually have separate launchers for each profile, but they just run a shell script with different arguments).

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#384

Post by jlarocco »

kleiba wrote: post #246

Firefox 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…

Firefox has a long history of denying problems, blaming the user, and fixing the issue years later.

It used to be memory usage, now it's crashing.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#385

Post by rafaelmn »

VorpalWay wrote: post #342
rafaelmn wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very few applications scale with cores You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.

Compilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ... (Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.) I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads…

But those tools aren't really compute bound anyway - you're not buying a workstation to do them, you're getting a consumer laptop or a tablet.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#386

Post by drob518 »

versteegen wrote: post #314
PunchyHamster wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I concur. A lot of “flakey” issues can be traced to poor quality power supplies. That’s a component that doesn’t get any attention in spec sheets other than a max power rating and I think a lot of manufacturers skimp there. As long as the system boots up and runs for a few minutes, they ship it.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#387

Post by ece »

Animats wrote: post #78

ECC should have become standard around the time memories passed 1GB. It's seriously annoying that ECC memory is hard to get and expensive, but memory with useless LEDs attached is cheap.

Looking back, I actually think the older the RAM the more likely you're able to notice bit-flips and they harm your workflow. EDO RAM was the worst in my experience (my first computer), SDRAM was a bit better, and random bit-flips atleast under load got very rare after DDR2. I think Google even had a paper comparing DDR1 vs DDR2 (link: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...).

That said, memory DIMM capacity increases with even a small chance of bit-flips means lots of people will still be affected.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#388

Post by ryukoposting »

It's worth noting that the thread says "up to 10%," not "10%" as the title suggests. So it's reasonable to believe the rate is as low as 5% based on the only real figure given (25000 / 470000)

I think our education system should include a unit on "marketing bullshit" sometime early in elementary school. Maybe as part of math class, after they learn inequalities. "Ok kids, remind me, what does 'up to' mean?" "less than or equal to!"

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#389

Post by cestith »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #358
m000 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OMG no. Politician have no business making technological decisions. They make it harder to innovate, i.e. to invent the next generation of ECC with a different name.

ECC is like Ethernet. The name doesn’t have to change for the technology to update.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#390

Post by roryirvine »

ciupicri wrote: post #346
sznio wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think standard RAM used to have long long time ago, but not anymore. DDR5 finally readd it sort of.

Yes, 30 pin SIMMs (the most common memory format from the mid-80s to the mid-90s) came in either '8 chip' or '9 chip' variants - the 9th chip being for the parity bit.

Most motherboards supported both, and the choice of which to use came down to the cost differential at the time of building a particular machine. The wild swings in DRAM prices meant that this could go from being negligible to significant within the course of a year or two!

When 72 pin SIMMs were introduced, they could in theory also come in a parity version but in reality that was fairly rare (full ECC was much better, and only a little more expensive). I don't think I ever saw an EDO 72 pin SIMM with parity, and it simply wasn't an option for DIMMs and later.

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