A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
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.
I suspect the stuff Firefox stores in ram is more sensitive, too. A lot of games load tens of gigabytes of textures, but a bitflip in that stuff will lead to a pixel somewhere being the wrong colour instead of a crash.
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.
I suspect the stuff Firefox stores in ram is more sensitive, too. A lot of games load tens of gigabytes of textures, but a bitflip in that stuff will lead to a pixel somewhere being the wrong colour instead of a crash.
You Firefox also hoards RAM? I thought it’s just mine.