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
I used to be a part of an anticheat dev team and we discovered that this was a common problem back in the Windows XP era.
We added a routine to check the memory addresses used after a crash and notified the user if we suspected hardware failure.
At the time we suspected unstable overclocks because the metrics showed us the computers affected were typically overclocked as well.