- > 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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"?
- > 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.
