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.
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 : (
I can’t say the same for Chromium. Despite barely using it, I had at least one tab or iframe crash last year, and there’s a moderate chance (I’ll suggest 15%) on any given day of leaving it open that it will just spontaneously die while I’m not paying attention to it (my wild guess, based on observations about Inkscape if it’s executing something CPU-bound for too long: it’s not responding in a timely fashion to the compositor, and is either getting killed or killing itself, not sure which that would be).
Frankly, from a crashing perspective, both are very reliable these days. Chromium is still far more prone to misrendering and other misbehaviour—they prefer to ship half-baked implementations and fix them later; Firefox, on the other hand, moves slower but has fewer issues in what they do ship.
RAM flips are common. This kind of thing is old and has likely gotten worse.
IBM had data on this. DEC had data on this. Amazon/Google/Microsoft almost certainly had data on this. Anybody who runs a fleet of computers gets data on this, and it is always eye opening how common it is.
ZFS is really good at spotting RAM flips.
Edit: more context, I power cycle at least once a week on desktop and the version is typically a bit behind new. I also don't have more tabs open than will fit in the row. All these habits seem likely to decrease crashes.
I've tried all kinds of things software-wise but keep getting random crashes.
I wonder if I should do a longer memory test, maybe some CPU stress testing at the same time...
Or you can view several of them and see if there's a common pattern in the "Signature" field. Firefox really should only be regularly crashing if: (1) there's a real bug and the thing that triggers it, (2) you're running out of memory, or (3) you have hardware.
I don't know what the odds of faulty hardware are for a randomly chosen user, but they're much higher for a randomly chosen user who is seeing regular crashes.
this may have something to do with the fact that my laptop is from 2017, however.
I agree. Good thing he doesn't back up his claim with any sort of evidence or reasoned argument, or you'd look like a huge moron!
> And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much.
The actual measurement is 5%. The 10% figure is entirely made up, with zero evidence or reasoned argument except a hand-wavy "conservative".
Edit: actually, the claim is even less supported:
> out of these ~25000 crashes have been detected as having a potential bit-flip. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory
"Potential" is a weasel word here. We don't see any of the actual methodology. For all we know, the real value could be 0.1% or 0.01%.
I wouldn't be too surprised if that 5% all come from a few particular bad machine.
The hardware bugs are there. They're just handled.
Live objects get swapped between Discardable buffers quite frequently. They're not expected to stay at the same position in memory.
Perhaps you're part of the group driving hardware crashes up to 10% and need to fix your machine.
> 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.
That's a misinterpretation. The finding refers to the composition of crashes, not the overall crash rate (which is not reported by the post). Brought to the extreme, there may have been 10 (reported) crashes in history of Firefox, and 1 due to faulty hardware, and the statement would still be correct.
Hardware problems are just as good a potential explanation for those as anything else.