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What Should crash-stats Do For You?

I have blogged recently about my contract to help in the area of crash reporting. Specifically, I am trying to help the Socorro team (which works on the crash-stats system) by gathering and presenting the engineering needs and use cases for reports and features that help us analyze trends and find and diagnose problems quickly. I'm not on the Socorro team myself but on the CrashKill team, which makes sure that the most important stability problems in Firefox actually get addressed. I will work closely with the Socorro team to ensure that they have what they need to implement some of these features and understand their priorities so they can find the right place on their roadmap. Understanding what crash-stats users need helps ensure we ship as stable as possible Firefox releases.

In this context, if you are using the crash-stats system, I would like your input; What are some of the use cases you run into most often? I'd be interested in hearing from developers, QA, release manager, etc. What questions are you trying to answer from crash-stats?

I will be going through many of the items currently in bugzilla and helping to prioritize them as well as put together detailed specs. Helping determine the criteria for detecting explosive crashes is one issue I am currently working on. If you think of additional reports that would be useful, please make sure there are bugs filed (under Webtools/Socorro) and CC me so I can understand the requests and help to get them in the development pipeline.

Thank you!

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on March 1st, 2011 22:11 | Tags: Firefox, Mozilla, Socorro, Veridian 3 | 8 comments | TrackBack

Comments

AuthorEntry

johnjbarton

quote
extension stats
Of course *all* of my crashes involve Firebug. The number one question I have when I visit crash-stats site is: How many other users who have this crash also running Firebug? If the answer is 95%, then I better spend some time on it because no one else will. If the answer is 5%, I'm having lunch.
2011-03-02 06:40

Smokey Ardisson

quote
John, if the crash is common enough, the Correlation tab will have correlation reports, and you can look at the Add-ons correlations to see if Firebug is often present when that crash happens.
2011-03-02 21:16

Jeff Muizelaar

quote
It would be nice if it was possible to get more summary information about a crash.
For example: What build ids does this crash all occur with? What operating system versions does this all occur with? etc.
2011-03-02 22:15

Josh Matthews

quote
I, like Jeff, would appreciate summaries of the data available - most recent 10 unique build ids, list of unique OS versions, range of uptimes, etc. I would also be really interested in data about spikes - seeing a graph of the number of crashes for a particular signature over time would be useful to track trends.
2011-03-04 02:20

johnjbarton

quote
Correlations info not useful
Regarding the point about "correlations" page, I've never found that info to be useful, sorry. I have looked at it, but I don't recall every finding something useful.
2011-03-10 18:59

MESeidel

quote
How far we are actually from separate threads for Windows or even tabs?
I know that this is a target for Firefox/Mozilla in general.
But I don't follow their development, only your blog.
It should help if only the crashing part needs to be reloaded afterwards.

Greetings
2011-03-11 01:17

Delfin Rojas

quote
Getting crash reports to include my extension
If the crash happens inside my extension I would like to view the source line. Is there a way to upload my symbols to Mozilla so the crash reports include my source, or to download raw crash dumps from crash-stats so I can process them myself with my extension symbols available?
2011-03-29 00:28

KaiRo

Webmaster

quote
Delfin: Bug 419879 tracks the ability to upload your own symbols, thanks for the comment!

All others: I have put all feedback I got up on a wiki page, we'll keep all those in mind when talking priorities for the team, thanks for your input!
2011-03-31 01:00

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