Live data from Hacker News

10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

mas.to

51–60 of 495 posts

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#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.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#52
post #50

I was running my PC with bad memory for a few weeks last year. Firefox crashed a LOT, way more than any other application I used during that time, so I've probably contributed a decent amount to these numbers...

It could be that firefox is written inefficiently though.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#53
post #11

>> 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 fun…

Everyone who has put serious effort into analyzing crash reports en mass has made similar discoveries that some portion of their crashes are best explained by faulty hardware. What percent that is mostly comes down to how stable your software is. The more bugs you have, the lower the portion that come from hardware. Firefox being at 10% from bad RAM just means that crashes due to FF bugs are somewhat uncommon but not nonexistent, which lines up with my experience with using FF.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#54

> 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.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#55

> 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.

Your gut may be leading you astray?

I also find that firefox crashes much more than chrome based browsers, but it is likely that chrome's superior stability is better handing of the other 90% of crashes.

If 50% of chrome crashes were due to bit flips, and bit flips effect the two browsers at basically the same rate, that would indicate that chrome experiences 1/5th the total crashes of firefox... even though the bit flip crashes happen at the same rate on both browsers.

It would have been better news for firefox if the number of crashes due to faulty hardware were actually much higher! These numbers indicate the vast majority of firefox crashes are actually from buggy software : (

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#56
post #26

It is rumored heavily on HN that when the first employee of Google, Craig Silverstein was asked about his biggest regret, he said: "Not pushing for ECC memory."

One of the points Linus Torvalds made a few years back was that enthusiasts/PC gamers should be pissed that consumer product availability/support for ECC is spotty because as mentioned up-thread they're the kind of user that will push their system, and if memory is the cause of instability there will be a smoking gun (and they can then set the speed within its stable capacity). Diagnosing bad RAM is a pain in the rear even if you're actively looking for a cause, never mind trying to get a general user to go further than blaming software or gremlins in the system for weirdness on whatever frequency it's occurring at.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#58

> 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.

He addresses this in the thread.

Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

#60

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…

Did you/he ever consider redundant allocation for high value content and hash checks for low value assets that are still important?

I imagine the largest volume of game memory consumption is media assets which if corrupted would really matter, and the storage requirement for important content would be reasonably negligible?

Post reply on HN