Unprovoked bitfllips then

Programs that use more memory could be slightly more susceptible to this sort of thing because if a bit gets randomly flipped somewhere in a computer’s memory, the bit flip more likely to happen in an application that has a larger ram footprint as opposed to an application with a small ram footprint.

I’m still surprised the percentage is this high.

I don’t think they’re arguing that Firefox is more susceptible to bit flips. They’re trying to say that their software is “solid” enough that a significant number of the reported crashes are due to faulty hardware, which is essentially out of their control.

If other software used the same methodology, you could probably use the numbers to statistically compare how “solid” the code base is between the two programs. For example, if the other software found that 20% of their crashes were caused by bit flips, you could reasonably assume that the other software is built better because a smaller portion of their crashes is within their control.

No, the exact % depends on how stable everything else is.

Like a trivial example, if you have 3 programs, one that sets a pointer to a random address and tries to dereference it, one that does this but only if the last two digits of a timer it checks are “69”, and one that never sets a pointer to an invalid address, based on the programs themselves, the first one will crash almost all the time, the second one will crash about 1% of the time, and the third one won’t crash at all.

If you had a mechanism to perfectly detect bit flips (honestly, that part has me the most curious about the OP), and you ran each program until you had detected 5 bit flip crashes (let’s say they happen 1 out of each 10k runs), then the first program will have something like a 0.01% chance of any given crash being due to bit flip, about 1% for the 2nd one, and 100% for the 3rd one (assuming no other issues like OS stability causing other crashes).

Going with those numbers I made up, every 10k “runs”, you’d see 1 crash from bit flips and 9 crashes from other reasons. Or for every crash report they receive, 1 of 10 are bit flips, and 9 of 10 are “other”. Well, more accurately, 1 of 20 for bit flip and 19 of 20 for other, due to the assumption that the detector only detects half of them, because they actually only measured 5%.

Ouch, my condolences to your wallet

Time to make a compromise by buying the cheapest €130 8GB stick.

LOL, nah, Firefox isn’t that stable. If 10% of crashes were caused by bad RAM, it means 90% were still caused by something else.

(My install regularly gets a memory leak that eventually makes my system unusable, BTW. I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of Firefox itself – more likely Javascript running in tabs, maybe interacting with an extension or something, and some of the blame goes to the kernel’s poor handling of low memory conditions – but it’s definitely not “dev humblebrag stable” for me.)

You can’t effect the number of bit flips your users hardware has, but you can affect how often buggy code corrupts their memory or otherwise crashes your program.

Let’s say any app will crash about once a year on my machine due to a bit flip. If the app is crap and crashes hundreds of times for other reasons, the bit flip is irrelevant. If the app is robust enough that the bit flip accounts for 10 % of the crashes, that basically means the app is pretty much never crashing due to poor code.

Anecdotal evidence, but I had both a 13th gen and 14th gen Intel CPU with the bug that caused them to over time, destroy themselves internally.

The most-user-visible way this initially came up, before the CPUs had degraded too far, was Firefox starting to crash, to the point that I initially used Firefox hitting some websites as my test case when I started the (painful) task of trying to diagnose the problem. I suspect that it’s because Firefox touches a lot of memory, and is (normally) fairly stable — a lot of people might not be too surprised if some random game crashes.

You’re assuming that app quality is constant. But if I made an app that crashes on launch, I can confidently say 0% of those crashes would be from bitflips.

Firefox isn’t special in some way that could cause bitflips, but it’s 1) where this data was collected (and why this post isnt talking about some other product) and 2) speaks to the quality of FF, because crashes are rare enough for bit flips to be a significant crash factor.

The takeaway is that for the FF team, and anyone using ram (everyone), bitflips are more common than expected

As a long time Firefox user, I believe Firefox sees orders of magnitude more RAM issues than other apps because it is using orders of magnitude more RAM than other apps.

It would be interesting to see how this works in Chrome. I would guess that it could be the same - people tend to leave their browsers open with hundreds of tabs and will never reboot their laptops. If you play a random game for 2 hours, bit flips shouldn’t be a problem. But if you keep your browser open for weeks or months with hundreds of tabs, that may cause problems.