Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.
I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17
First of all let's talk briefly about how memory works. What you have in your PC or phone is what we call dynamic random access memory. That is memory that stores bits by putting a minuscule amount of charge into vanishingly small capacitors (or not putting it in if we're storing a zero).
These capacitors continuously leak this charge, so it needs to be refreshed periodically - every few milliseconds - which is why it's called "dynamic". 2/17
This design is *extremely* analog in nature. When your machine needs to read some bits the capacitors holding them are connected to a bunch of wires. The very small voltage difference that happens in the wire is detected by the use of a circuit that turns it into a clear 0 or 1 value (this is called a sense amplifier). 3/17
So how can this fail? In a huge number of ways. Circuits age with time and use. The ability of the individual capacitors to hold the charge goes down slowly over time, the transistors in the sense amplifiers degrade, points of contact oxidize, etc... Past a certain point this can make the whole process end up outside of the thresholds required to reliably read, write and retain the bits in memory. 4/17
This can lead to different failures: a very common one is a stuck bit, which ends up being always read as 1 or 0, regardless of what was written into it. Another type is timing-dependent failures, which cause a bit to flip but only if it's not touched in due time by an access or a refresh. More catastrophic errors can affect entire lines - which is what happens when a sense amplifier starts to fail. 5/17
Either way, even a single bit error which happens once in a blue moon is catastrophic to a consumer machine. Sometimes it will cause a pixel to slightly change color, but sometimes it will affect an important computation and lead to a crash. Or worse: it'll cause some user data to be corrupted before it's written to disk, and when it is, the damage has become permanent. 6/17
If your machine exhibits rare but hard-to-explain crashes, or if you're forced to reinstall programs - or even the operating system - because of mysterious failures, or experience random reboots or BSODs, then it's very likely that your memory is failing and you need to replace it. 7/17
Diagnosing it is hard. Windows has a memory diagnostic tool which will catch the worst offenders and is easy to use: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/do-more-with-surface/how-to-use-windows-memory-diagnostic
It's not enough though, some errors can only be caught with more extensive testing. I recommend the open-source memtest86+ (https://memtest.org/) tool or the closed source memtest86 one (https://www.memtest86.com/) 8/17
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Naturally what happens on PCs also happens on phones, network devices, printers, TVs, etc... but you can't test them. This is a disaster because these failures are common, and they become more and more common as the device ages. If we want to have repairable devices that last for a long time, the industry will have to change its practices, but more about this later. 9/17
Now you might wonder: how often does this actually happen? The common wisdom on this topic is that hardware failures are so rare that software bugs will always dwarf them. As I found out this is demonstrably false.
While investigating Firefox crashes I've come to the conclusion that several of the most common issues we were dealing with were likely caused by flaky hardware. This led me to come up with a simple heuristic to detect crashes potentially caused by bit-flips. 10/17
Deploying this heuristic to Mozilla's crash reporting infrastructure has been eye opening: if I take the 10 most common crashes on Windows, 7 are out-of-memory conditions - that is, not bugs - and 3 are likely caused by bad memory.
You've read that right, three out of the ten most common reasons why Firefox crashes on Windows are caused by memory that's gone bad. 11/17
Now there's a few things that are worth mentioning: users with bad hardware will be over-represented in this category, their machines will crash far more often than others.
The second thing is that Firefox is exceptionally stable, we've driven down its crash rate by more than >70% in the last few years. But Firefox is also a 30 million-lines-of-code monster. There are bugs in there, but they're less common than hardware failures! 12/17
Plotting these types of crashes against time yields interesting trends: the more machines age the more likely they are to encounter hardware-related failures. You might think that's obvious, and indeed it is, but until now the industry has looked the other way, based on the hand-wavy excuse that hardware failures were less common than bugs. 13/17
So what needs to change? First of all, error detection and correction must become commonplace. You can already build a desktop machine with ECC memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory), but it's uncommon in laptops, even mobile workstations, and completely absent on phones and other consumer appliances. This will measurably lengthen the usable life of these devices. 14/17
Note that detection is more important than correction. The user needs to know that there's something wrong without having to run a memory testing program. Think of the lights that turn on in cars if something's malfunctioning, or the error beeps that your washing machine makes when it thinks it's leaking water. These are extremely common, they need to be on computing devices too. 15/17
Finally hardware design must change to make devices repairable and prolong their useful life. Yes, I'm looking at non-ECC memories soldered on the motherboard or worse, on the same substrate as the CPU. 16/17
To end the thread I'd like to thank my colleagues Alex Franchuk and @willcage who did the implementation work and my boss Gian-Carlo Pascutto who plotted crashes against machine age. I'd also like to point out that we've got preliminary data on the topic, but I fully intend to write a proper article with a detailed analysis of the data. 17/17