Post #1802486
2026-03-06 08:32 UTC
Replies (6)
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@thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2026-03-06 08:40
You can't effect the number of bit flips your users hardware has, but you can affect how often buggy code corrupts their memory or otherwise crashes your program. Let's say any app will crash about once a year on my machine due to a bit flip. If the app is crap and crashes hundreds of times for other reasons, the bit flip is irrelevant. If the app is robust enough that the bit flip accounts for 10 % of the crashes, that basically means the app is pretty much *never* crashing due to poor code.
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@tal@lemmy.today 2026-03-06 08:52
Anecdotal evidence, but I had both a 13th gen and 14th gen Intel CPU with the bug that caused them to over time, destroy themselves internally. The most-user-visible way this initially came up, before the CPUs had degraded too far, was Firefox starting to crash, to the point that I initially used Firefox hitting some websites as my test case when I started the (painful) task of trying to diagnose the problem. I suspect that it's because Firefox touches a lot of memory, and is (normally) fairly stable --- a lot of people might not be too surprised if some random game crashes.
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@Kairus@lemmy.world 2026-03-06 08:50
You're assuming that app quality is constant. But if I made an app that crashes on launch, I can confidently say 0% of those crashes would be from bitflips. Firefox isn't special in some way that could cause bitflips, but it's 1) where this data was collected (and why this post isnt talking about some other product) and 2) speaks to the quality of FF, because crashes are rare enough for bit flips to be a significant crash factor. The takeaway is that for the FF team, and anyone using ram (everyone), bitflips are more common than expected
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@Deestan@lemmy.world 2026-03-06 09:33
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.
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@r00ty@kbin.life 2026-03-06 09:15
No, they're saying Firefox uses so much ram they're far far more likely to be a victim!
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@JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 2026-03-06 09:03
It would be interesting to see how this works in Chrome. I would guess that it could be the same - people tend to leave their browsers open with hundreds of tabs and will never reboot their laptops. If you play a random game for 2 hours, bit flips shouldn't be a problem. But if you keep your browser open for weeks or months with hundreds of tabs, that may cause problems.