Gabriele Svelto, an engineer at Mozilla, published the results of an analysis of the connection between Firefox crashes and memory corruption caused by hardware issues. Of the 470 Firefox crash reports received over the past week, 25 were attributed to potential bit corruption due to unstable memory chips.
It is noted that this is merely a conservative heuristic, underestimating the actual number of crashes due to memory issues, and the actual number of crashes due to memory issues may reach 10%. In other words, up to 10% of all Firefox crashes are caused not by code errors, but by hardware defects. If we exclude crashes due to memory exhaustion, the share of crashes due to memory corruption reaches 15%.
To confirm crashes due to bit corruption, a tool was developed to test the correct operation of RAM, which was run on user systems after a crash. To support the hypothesis that memory defects significantly contribute to crashes, users were asked to run a memory test. For every two crashes suspected of being caused by bit corruption, the memory test identified one actual hardware issue, despite the fact that the test lasted no more than three seconds and only covered the first 1 GB of memory.
Source: opennet.ru
