Gabriele Svelto (Gabriele Svelto), an engineer from Mozilla, published the results of an analysis of the connection between Firefox crashes and memory bit corruption caused by hardware problems. Of the 470,000 reports of Firefox crashes received over the past week, 25,000 cases were identified as potential bit corruption due to unstable memory chips.
It is indicated that this is only a conservative heuristic that underestimates the indicators, and the actual number of crashes due to memory problems can be up to 10%. In other words, up to 10% of all Firefox crashes are caused not by errors in the code, but by hardware defects. If we do not take into account failures due to problems associated with the exhaustion of available memory, then the share of crashes due to memory bit corruption reaches 15%.
To confirm failures due to bit corruption, a tool has been developed to check the correct operation of RAM, which is launched on user systems after an abnormal termination. To support the hypothesis that memory defects have a significant impact on crashes, users were asked to perform memory testing. For every two crashes suspected to be caused by memory bit corruption, the memory test identified one actual hardware problem, even though the test was run for no more than 3 seconds and only covered the first 1 GB of memory.