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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

#421

Post by loeg »

Maxion wrote: post #278
conception wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.

If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware. I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.

Eventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage.

> I much prefer cheaper hardware.

The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#422

Post by mock-possum »

BorisMelnik wrote: post #380
versteegen wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah dell consumer pc psus were so awful

Which is kinda crazy to me, in light of how durable their business laptops have been in my experience. I’ve owned maybe 6 pc laptops in my career, and the only 2 that’ve survived that nearly 20 year space are both dells.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#423

Post by zadikian »

conception wrote: post #201
thousand_nights wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overblown? billions of users use consumer tier hardware just fine. i have servers at home with years of uptime without any ECC memory

But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.

I'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#424

Post by sfink »

titzer wrote: post #377

I had a refurbished ThinkPad that had memory corruption. I only noticed because Firefox started to crash an unreasonable amount. Ran memcheck through BIOS and sure enough it was bad RAM. Have we considered that maybe Firefox is the cause of bad memory? /s

It is.

If a tree falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a computer flips bits while it's not doing anything with that memory, does it have bad RAM?

A fair number of people pretty much only use their computers as web browsers.

QED

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#425

Post by zadikian »

rafaelmn wrote: post #303
throwaway85825 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.

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

In theory, do you need a single machine for any of that, or would it be cheaper to use a low-availability cloud cluster? Tests are totally independent, and builds probably parallel enough.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#426

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sandworm101 wrote: post #394
likelystory wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see that: - Firefox may be more prevalent on those using Linux, since FF is less “corporate” than Chrome or Edge. - People using Linux are probably putting Linux on old machines that had versions of Windows that are no longer supported. However, what I can’t say next is “PSUs would get old and stop putting out as much” because that doesn’t tend to happen. They just die. Those running Linux on some old tower m…

>> People using Linux are probably putting Linux on old machines Maybe for linux noobs. But i would suggest that most linux users are not noobs booting a disused pentium from a live CD. They are running linux on the same hardware as windows users. I would further suggest that as anyone installing a not-windows OS is more tech savvy than the average, that linux users actually take better care of thier machines. Linux…

Unix user for 35 years, Linux for 30+ years ... my case fan died during the summer of last year ... just took the side panel off and kept things running.

So much for taking pride in my machine :)

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#427

Post by zadikian »

loeg wrote: post #421
Maxion wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware. I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.

Eventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage. > I much prefer cheaper hardware. The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.

12% for the DIMMs only, but with Intel you need Xeon and its accompanying motherboard for it. Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered.

Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost, yeah I would pay 12% more for ECC. But I'm with the other guy on not valuing it a ton. I have backups which are needed regardless of bitrot, and even if those don't help, losing a photo isn't a huge deal for me.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#428

Post by rpcope1 »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #182
rpcope1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.

Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.

I have come to doubt that single core or CPU performance in general, other than maybe specialty applications like CAD and some games, is all that noticeable for most computer users in the last decade. I can take relatively pedestrian users like my parents or my wife and put them in front of a decade old high end Haswell system or a brand new mega-$$$ threadripper/epyc and for almost all intents and purposes they don't notice a different. What they do notice is when things die. I'm sure consumer hardware might be OK for 2-3 years (maybe), but like for my parents, they're happier to keep using the same computer, and honestly the same Dell Precision system I gave them almost 10 years ago works great today, and I have a suspicion that the hardware, outside of maybe the SSD finally wearing out, will probably work right a decade from now too.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#429

Post by zadikian »

loeg wrote: post #418
rafaelmn wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that consumer device should have ECC! That's the whole discussion here.

It's confusing because a few comments up is "for the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper" which is unrelated to ECC.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#430

Post by jodrellblank »

netcoyote wrote: post #33

I'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…

This is getting off-topic but I’m amazed by this ability to reach out to computers around the world as a sensor array and infer things we can’t easily find out in other ways. It’s in popular culture and HN comments most often as spyware and mass surveillance of people, and that’s a bit of a shame.

GPS location and movement data is what gives Google maps its near-real-time view of traffic on all roads, and busy-ness of all shops.

I think they collect location data from people riding public transport so they can tell you how long people wait on average at bus stops before getting on a bus.

Does Google collect atmospheric pressure readings from phone altimeters and use it for weather models? Could they?

Kindle collects details on books people read, how far they read, where they stop, which sections they highlight and quote, which words they look up in dictionaries.

I wonder if anyone’s curated a list of things like this which do happen or have been tried, excluding the “gathers user data for advertising” category which would become the biggest one, drowning out everything else.

I think current phones use accelerometer data to detect possible car crashes and call emergency services. Google could use that in aggregate to identify accident blackspots but I don’t know if they do. But that would be less useful because the police already know everywhere a big accident happens because people call the police. So that’s data easily found a different way.

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