>> 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...

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netcoyote 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It is huge, but real (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258500)

Browsers, videogames, and Microsoft Excel push computers really hard compared to regular applications, so I expect they're more likely to cause these types of errors.

The original Diablo 2 game servers for battle.net, which were Compaq 1U servers, failed at astonishing rates due to their extremely high utilization and consequent heat-generation. Compaq had never seen anything like it; most of their customers were, I guess, banking apps doing 3 TPS.

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alpaca128 a day ago | parent [-]

In my case it doesn't seem to be related to system load. I have an issue where (mainly) using FF can trigger random system freezes on Linux, often with the browser going down first. But running CPU/memory stress tests, compiling things etc don't cause any errors and the cooler is downright bored.

	▲	alpaca128 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Update: it's starting to look like CPU C-states were the problem.

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plorkyeran a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everyone who has put serious effort into analyzing crash reports en mass has made similar discoveries that some portion of their crashes are best explained by faulty hardware. What percent that is mostly comes down to how stable your software is. The more bugs you have, the lower the portion that come from hardware. Firefox being at 10% from bad RAM just means that crashes due to FF bugs are somewhat uncommon but not nonexistent, which lines up with my experience with using FF.

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bjourne a day ago | parent [-]

IME, random bitflips is the engineer's way of saying "I'm sick and tired of root cause analysis" or "I have no fucking clue what the bug is." I, like others, remain skeptical about the claim.

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wmf a day ago | parent | next [-]

We're not talking about unexplained bugs here. We're talking about a pointer that obviously has one bit flipped and it would be correct if you flipped that one bit back.

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compiler-guy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

“I have no data, but I’m sure those who do have data, and have spent a significant amount of time analyzing it, are wrong.”

	▲	bjourne 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, touché. But I'm willing to change my mind once I've seen that data and the methodology Svelto used to analyze it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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SoftTalker a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Computers today have many GB of RAM, and programs that use it.

The more RAM you have, the higher the probabilty that there will be some bad bits. And the more RAM a program uses, the more likely it will be using some that is bad.

Same phenomenon with huge hard drives.

	▲	lukev a day ago \| parent [-]
		And most the time a bit flips it means that there's a wonky pixel somewhere in a photo, texture or video that you'd never even notice. A bit flip actually needs to be pretty "lucky" to result in a crash.

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rockdoe 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

But they have?