I flip my bits looking at porn using FireFox and that shit almost never crashes 🤷♂️
10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
Submitted 6 hours ago by JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/116171750653898304
Comments
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 hours ago
hakunawazo@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Maybe it was too vanilla to crash. 🍨
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 hours ago
Guess Linus was right again to only use ECC RAM.
Retail4068@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Let’s spend a ton of extra money minimizing edge case crashing in a browser!!!
🙄
roofuskit@lemmy.world 18 minutes ago
Yeah I can’t remember the last time my browser crashed. No way I’m upgrading all that hardware to avoid something that happens that seldom.
bruhduh@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I have lga 1356 xeon 2470v2 with 64gb ddr3 ecc ram, cheap and good setup
Staff@piefed.world 3 hours ago
Which Linus?
otp@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
The guy with the blanket from Charlie Brown
vpklotar@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Torvalds
W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Firefox kept crashing on me a few days ago. Decided to run MemTest86 and sure enough. Bad RAM.
Photonic@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Ouch, my condolences to your wallet
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 4 hours ago
Time to make a compromise by buying the cheapest €130 8GB stick.
flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
This is how dev humblebrag sounds like.
Our app is so stable only random hardware events like bitflips can crash it.grue@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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.)
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 minutes ago
10% of all crashes is definitively a brag. Crashes due to faulty hardware/bitflips is rare rare, generally I would expect that percentage to be less than 1% in any complex app
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 6 hours ago
Well, that’s unnerving.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 6 hours ago
*interest in parity-checking server RAM intensifies*
llii@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
When I upgrade my home server I would like a low-power system with ECC RAM. I hope it will be financially viable in the future.
tal@lemmy.today 6 hours ago
The problem is that ECC is used to permit price discrimination between server (less price sensitive) and PC (more price sensitive) users. Like, there’s a significant price difference, more than cost-of-manufacture would warrant. There are only a few companies that make motherboard chipsets, like Intel, and they have enough price control over the industry that they can do that.
Also…I’m not sure that ECC is the right fix. I kind of wonder whether the fact is actually that the memory is broken, or that people are manually overclocking and running memory that would be stable at a lower rate at too high of a rate, which will cause that. Or whether BIOSes, which can automatically detect a viable rate by testing memory, are simply being too aggressive in choosing high memory bandwidth rates.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 4 hours ago
I’ve been checking around the used market for DDR4. It seems used ECC DDR4 sticks are now cheaper due to low demand.
Mihies@programming.dev 5 hours ago
In the middle rampocalypse you even wish for an ECC one?
reddig33@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Wouldn’t that mean ten percent of all crashes in all apps would be caused by bit flips? What makes Firefox special?
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
That’s the way people should be looking at it. It basically means hard crashes are extremely rare in the firefox ecosystem.
To be fair, I can’t remember the last time a browser crashed on me in general.
tal@lemmy.today 6 hours ago
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.
Kairus@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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
Deestan@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 5 hours ago
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.
Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
Lol
GreenBeanMachine@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
What makes Firefox more susceptible to bitflips than any other software. Wouldn’t that mean 10% of all software crashes are caused by bitflips and it just depends what software you are running when that happens.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 minutes ago
That seems like a broad generalization, and for specialized software that requires newer hardware, you’d expect to find the rate of bitflips crashes much lower than 10%. You could argue that since Firefox is supported on older operating systems, longer than the support lifetime of the OS ^[theverge.com/…/mozilla-is-dropping-firefox-suppor…], it’s likely Firefox is being used specifically to get the last bit of life out of the hardware before it gets trashed.