# Exploring Firefox crash data, Part I

Written by Shuhao on 2013-07-25 23:04

Recently I've taken on a new challenge at Mozilla: analyze Firefox crash stats to find "explosive" crashes. That is, finding events that have a high upward trend and should be a cause for concern for those in the engineering department.

So what are "explosive crashes"? Before we can get to that, we need to take a look at what each crash report consists of. When Firefox crashes, it sends back a core dump with some information to Socorro. Socorro takes the core dump and generates a signature. An example signature could be gfxContext::PushClipsToDT(mozilla::gfx::DrawTarget*) or CContext::RestorePipelineStateImpl<int>(SAPIPipelineState*) and they group similar/identical crashes together. Explosive crashes are signatures that experience a sudden increased in crash volume. We need to catch these signatures as they are usually related to an emerging bug. Since we get so many crashes per day (around 3000 crashes per minute), it is simply infeasible for human beings to go in and identify these explosive events. This is why we need an algorithm to detect these automatically.

For the past week or so, I have been looking at historic Firefox crash data available from crash-analytics to explore the data and get a good idea of what I am dealing with. The data set available on the site represents about 10% of the crash reports that are randomly selected.

First, I generated some summarizing graphs to see what the data is all about.

Note: the data here are from April 15th 2013 to June 15th 2013. The x axis probably does not make any sense. It simply represents the bins.

All crash counts per 6, 12, and 24 hours

These here are all crashes binned against time. Each point represents the number of crashes that happened in that bin (6, 12, 24 hour period). Visually, we can already tell that the data is highly periodic, especially in the 6 and 12 hour bins. We can see that there are more crashes during the weekdays than the weekends. We can also see that there is a day night cycle.

The blue boxes are the weekdays and the red boxes are the weekends.

Similar cycles exist for crash volumes for individual signatures. Most of them follow one global trend or another global trend. We see that the signatures all are gradually decreasing like the global crash volume. You can see that the second and third signature do not appear to follow the weekday/weekend cycle. This is an interesting phenomenon that I do not have an explanation to.

Note: the SHA1 on top is simply a SHA1 of the crash signature so it is easier to work with when I'm calling the tool I wrote in command line. It is insignificant.

Crashes for the top 3 crash signatures binned by 6 hours.

Crashes for the top 3 crash signatures binned by 24 hours.

At this point, it is pretty clear that it is probably a good idea to work with the 24 hour bin as oppose to anything smaller as it smooths out the day night cycle. Also, since the plan is to run the explosive detection script as a cron job that happens every night, looking at smaller intervals do not really give us any significant advantages.

However, it still seems obvious that the global crash rates influences crash rates for particular signatures such that when global crash rate rises, crash rates for individual signatures also rise and vice versa. In our detection algorithm, we need to establish a baseline so that we won't flag events such as people turning on their computers after a weekend as an explosive crash. So the first thing I tried is to use a ratio between crashes for a particular signature and the global crashes. This is computed using the following:

$$\mbox{ratio} = \frac{\mbox{crash count for signature}}{\mbox{global crash count}}$$

Note: this ratio is displayed on the y axis.

Crash ratios for the top 3 crash signatures binned by 24 hours.

We can see it smoothed out a the original data by a little. While the graphs may be deceiving, we can see from the y axis that the drops and rises are not as steep as the original graphs. This remained to be a pretty tempting method until I started experimented on a different set of data: during the 2012 Olympics, Google released a doodle that crashed Firefox and doubled our total crash volume. It looks something like this:

Crash volume doubled due to a Google Doodle

Since most signatures did not see an "explosive" rise in volume, the normalized graphs showed a dip during the day Google activated the problematic doodle followed by a drastic rise as Google turned off the doodle. This dip is problematic as it follows with a rise, which is not really the case when you look at the absolute crash volume.

Crash counts for 3 crash signatures during the 2 months surrounding the Google Doodle event. The last one is probably the signature for the crash caused by the Doodle, although I cannot be sure.

Crash ratios for 3 crash signatures during the 2 months surrounding the Google Doodle event

At this point in time, I felt like I was not getting anywhere with these graphs. I did feel fairly comfortable with the data set presented to me, so I moved on to formulating a more rigorous definition of explosive crashes. (although there is still a lot to see, even though I have seen much more graphs than just the ones I've displayed here).

Intuitively, we tend to think of these crashes as crashes that happens over night and represents a significant portion of the total crash volume. This seem relatively simple as all we really need to determine is a high upward slope for any given crash rates. However, as we talked about previously, it is difficult to establish a baseline to filter out the seasonality and global trends.

This is further complicated by the fact that how do you turn "high upward slope" into an actually mathematical formula? One could simply establish a threshold for the slope or counts (or other measure of "crashiness"). However, since slope is calculated via the current value minus the last value, an increase from 500 crashes to 10500 crashes would have a slope of 10000 as well as an increase from 100000 to 110000 crashes. The increase from 500 to 10500 seems rather unexpected while the 100000 to 110000 increase could just be noise.

If all we care is unexpected events, then can't we just detect any outliers? Pretend that we can predict the amount of crashes that we are expected to see tomorrow. When tomorrow becomes today, we can then check if the actual rate is much much higher than the predicted rate for each signature. If this is true, we mark the signature as being explosive. Mathematically, it is defined as:

$$\widehat{y_t} - y_t > \sigma_\hat{y}$$

Where $\widehat{y_t}$ is the predicted crash counts at time $t$ and $\sigma_\hat{y}$ is the uncertainty or error of the prediction $\widehat{y_t}$.

A neat thing about this formula is that $y$ does not have to be based on the crash count alone. We could use a normalized version of the crash count, the slope of the crash counts over time, or any other properties that we can derive from the crash volume.

The first thing we want to find out is if we could in fact infer tomorrow's crash counts based on history. To do this, we check out the lagged scatter plot and ACF of our dataset.

Lagged scatter plot and sample ACF plot

This is all I have done so far and I think the next step for me would be figure out a prediction algorithm for $\widehat{y_t}$ and $\sigma_\hat{y}$. I think it is a fairly safe bet to use ARMA as it seem to satisfy all the requirements for it to be used. However, I am still working on confirming that (this is the first time I have done time series analysis so I am learning as I go along).

Subscribe for part 2 (hopefully by the middle of next week)!