I didn't anticipate there would be so much interest in how memory in consumer devices goes bad, but since there is I'll try to write a short thread later on the topic.
I personally encountered lots of computers with bad memory while helping friends and family, but what really gave me a measure of the problem is when I figured out a heuristic to detect how many Firefox users encounter crashes because of it.
@gabrielesvelto I don't have statistics (we never spent the time gathering them), but, when I was at Yahoo, we had evidence of single-bit errors in our analytics packets: Flurry event names are strings, and it was easy to spot events whose name was off by one bit.
@jbqueru yes, we see that too in Firefox telemetry and other text-based data. I remember a particularly hilarious case where a Windows module name in a report had changed to kernel33.dll.
Add comment