Gabriele Svelto, an engineer at Mozilla, published the results of an analysis linking Firefox crashes to memory bit corruption caused by hardware issues. Out of 470,000 crash reports received in the last week, 25,000 instances were identified as potentially caused by bit corruption due to unstable memory chip performance.
It was noted that this is merely a conservative heuristic that understates the figures, and the actual number of crashes due to memory issues could reach 10%. In other words, up to 10% of all Firefox crashes are caused not by code errors, but by hardware defects. Excluding crashes due to memory exhaustion issues, the share of crashes caused by memory bit corruption reaches 15%.
To confirm crashes due to bit corruption, a memory integrity checking tool was developed to run on user systems following a crash. To support the hypothesis of significant memory defect influence on crashes, users were encouraged to perform memory testing. For every two crashes that were presumed to be caused by bit corruption, the memory test identified one actual hardware problem, despite the testing being conducted for no more than 3 seconds and only covering the first 1 GB of memory.
Source: opennet.ru
