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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

#481

Post by hobofan »

hobofan wrote: post #315
jiggunjer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

EDIT (as I can't edit the orginal comment anymore): The America - English disticts are very lively and it seem like everyone in Europe is also now using those.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#482

Post by altairprime »

loeg wrote: post #83
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.

It's not even ECC price/availability that bothers me so much, it's that getting CPUs and motherboards that support ECC is non-trivial outside of the server space. The whole consumer class ecosystem is kind of shitty. At least AMD allows consumer class CPUs to kinda sorta use ECC, unlike Intel's approach where only the prosumer/workstation stuff gets ECC.

288-pin ECC is, I believe, available on any X670E/X870E platform boards so long as the motherboard builder hasn’t expressly interfered with it (and probably other chipsets as well?). Windows 10+ reports it as full ECC (multi-bit / 72-bits). AMD pushed that enable in an AGESA three or four years ago iirc. The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers, but in practice other more costly factors tend to limit performance first. Any motherboard released before the AGESA update would be more difficult to predict, but that’s baseline uncertainty for PCs so no surprises there.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#483

Post by qingcharles »

chedabob wrote: post #326
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.

Ye some of the weirdest issues I've fixed have been PSU related. I had a PC come to me that would boot fine, but if you opened the CD drive it'd shut off instantly.

Used to repair PCs in the mid 90s. Had guy come in with right mouse button not working suddenly. Replaced mouse. No go. Replaced motherboard, CPU, RAM, reinstalled Windows. No go. Changed the PSU. Right mouse button worked.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#484

Post by robocat »

DennisP wrote: post #415
pizza wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“never go to sea with two chronometers, take one or three”

Seems like chronometers would be a case where two are better than one, because the mistakes are analog. If they don't exactly agree, just take the average. You'll have more error than if you were lucky enough to take the better chronometer, but less than if you had taken only the worse one. Minimizing the worst case is probably the best way to stay off the rocks.

And for breaking failures, two is way better than one! Having zero working chronometers would be bad.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#485

Post by michaelcampbell »

LM358 wrote: post #54
shevy-java wrote: post #51

> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect; I don't seem to get the same amount of crashes using chromium-based browsers such as thorium.

10% of crashes does not imply 10% of your crashes.

Doesn't mean 10% of any crashes either; the OP narrowed it down to roughly 1 in 20, then pulled a factor of 2 out of, well, thin air to get 10%.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#486

Post by DennisP »

robocat wrote: post #484
DennisP wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like chronometers would be a case where two are better than one, because the mistakes are analog. If they don't exactly agree, just take the average. You'll have more error than if you were lucky enough to take the better chronometer, but less than if you had taken only the worse one. Minimizing the worst case is probably the best way to stay off the rocks.

And for breaking failures, two is way better than one! Having zero working chronometers would be bad.

And come to think of it, if the two chronometers are wrong in different directions, then the average could be more accurate than either of them.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#487

Post by throwaway85825 »

loeg wrote: post #476
rafaelmn wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why ? If your device is a thin client for web services/gaming the risk of bitflips/bad ram is a minor annoyance.

I disagree with your handwaving bitflips away as a minor annoyance. Consumers don't love software crashing, even if they don't have any data they care about. Imagine ECC was free -- would you rather have free ECC and no bitflips, or no ECC and bitflips? It's hard to imagine choosing bitflips.

ECC would save an unbelievable amount of labor. A shocking number of people have jobs looking at various logs.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#488

Post by antonkochubey »

altairprime wrote: post #482
loeg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even ECC price/availability that bothers me so much, it's that getting CPUs and motherboards that support ECC is non-trivial outside of the server space. The whole consumer class ecosystem is kind of shitty. At least AMD allows consumer class CPUs to kinda sorta use ECC, unlike Intel's approach where only the prosumer/workstation stuff gets ECC.

288-pin ECC is, I believe, available on any X670E/X870E platform boards so long as the motherboard builder hasn’t expressly interfered with it (and probably other chipsets as well?). Windows 10+ reports it as full ECC (multi-bit / 72-bits). AMD pushed that enable in an AGESA three or four years ago iirc. The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers, but in practice other more costly factors tend to…

>The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers

Ironically, overclocking ECC memory is much easier than overclocking non-ECC DIMMs, because you know exactly at which point you start encountering instability and need to dial back, instead of relying on.. application crashes and BSOD's to know that you're running way too optimistic clocks/timings.

Meanwhile I overclocked 'low clock / loose timing' ECC DIMMs on Ryzen 7 platform with no issues at all – kept increasing clocks and lowering timings until ECC started reporting errors, then dialed it back a couple notches, and now it is not just stable, but I also have exact reporting of it being stable.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#489

Post by cromka »

antonkochubey wrote: post #488
altairprime wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

288-pin ECC is, I believe, available on any X670E/X870E platform boards so long as the motherboard builder hasn’t expressly interfered with it (and probably other chipsets as well?). Windows 10+ reports it as full ECC (multi-bit / 72-bits). AMD pushed that enable in an AGESA three or four years ago iirc. The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers, but in practice other more costly factors tend to…

>The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers Ironically, overclocking ECC memory is much easier than overclocking non-ECC DIMMs, because you know exactly at which point you start encountering instability and need to dial back, instead of relying on.. application crashes and BSOD's to know that you're running way too optimistic clocks/timings. Meanwhile I overclocked 'low clock / loose timing' ECC D…

Same experience here. I have a feeling ECC in gaming would soon become a thing if it wasn't for the pricing crisis.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#490

Post by Grisu_FTP »

IIRC Linus Torvalds said in the Linus Tech Tips video he was in that he thinks many of the bluescreens Windows gets a bad rep for are actually bitflips that happen due to most desktops not using ECC-Memory.

Since i have seen this video this question has been in my mind from time to time.

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