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
Bit rot is real, I’ve seen it first hand in plenty of cases. While I tend to blame the storage device, for infrequently accessed files that have been copied multiple times across different drives, I can’t rule out RAM or some other source of the corruption.
Bit rot is real, I’ve seen it first hand in plenty of cases. While I tend to blame the storage device, for infrequently accessed files that have been copied multiple times across different drives, I can’t rule out RAM or some other source of the corruption.