[HN Gopher] 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
___________________________________________________________________
10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
Author : marvinborner
Score : 33 points
Date : 2026-03-04 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mas.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (mas.to)
| thegrim33 wrote:
| A 5 part thread where they say they're "now 100% positive" the
| crashes are from bitflips, yet not a single word is spent on how
| they're supposedly detecting bitflips other than just "we analyze
| memory"?
| tredre3 wrote:
| > last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on
| user machines after the browser crashes.
|
| He doesn't explain anything indeed but presumably that code is
| available somewhere.
| kdklol wrote:
| I'm glad to see somebody is getting some data on this, I feel bad
| memory is one of the most underrated issues in computing
| generally. I'd like to see a more detailed writeup on this, like
| a short whitepaper.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see
| are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! If I
| subtract crashes that are caused by resource exhaustion (such as
| out-of-memory crashes) this number goes up to around 15%.
|
| Crashes caused by resource exhaustion are still software bugs in
| Firefox. At least on sane operating systems where memory isn't
| over-comitted.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Memory isn't the only resource.
| kmoser wrote:
| The next logical step would be to somehow inform users so they
| could take action to replace the bad memory. I realize this is a
| challenge given the anonymized nature of the crash data, but I
| might be willing to trade some anonymity in exchange for
| stability.
| titaniumtravel wrote:
| The easy solution for that is to just do that analysis
| _locally_... Firefox doesn 't submit the full core dumps anyhow
| for this exact reason and therefore needs to do some
| preprocessing in any case.
| vsgherzi wrote:
| is there a way to get the memory tester he mentioned? Is it open
| source? Once Ram goes bad is there a way or recovering it or is
| it toasted forever?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| People I think are overindexing on this being about "Bad
| hardware".
|
| We have long known that single bit errors in RAM are basically
| "normal" in terms of modern computers. Google did this research
| in 2009 to quantify the number of error events in commodity DRAM
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
|
| They found 25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per
| Mbit and more than 8% of DIMMs affected by errors per year.
|
| At the time, they did not see an increase in this rate in "new"
| RAM technologies, which I think is DDR3 at that time. I wonder if
| there has been any change since then.
|
| A few years ago, I changed from putting my computer to sleep
| every night, to shutting it down every night. I boot it fresh
| every day, and the improvements are dramatic. RAM errors will
| accumulate if you simply put your computer to sleep regularly.
| NotGMan wrote:
| >> 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 functioning machines, but even
| then this dwarfs all the previous estimates I saw regarding this
| problem.
|
| Might be the case, but 10% is still huge.
|
| There imo has to be something else going on. Either their
| userbase/tracking is biased or something else...
| nubinetwork wrote:
| 470k crashes in a week? Considering how low their market share
| is, that would suggest every install crashes several times a
| day... I gotta call bs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-04 23:01 UTC)