Second verse, much like the first: how quickly do we get data from clients?

This time: crash pings.

Recording Delay

The recording delay of crash pings is different from main pings in that the only time information we have about when the information happens is crashDate, which only tells you the day the crash happened, not the time. This results in a weird stair-step pattern on the plot as I make a big assumption:

Assumption: If the crash ping was created on the same day that the crash happened, it took essentially 0 time to do so. (If I didn’t make this assumption, the plot would have every line at 0 for the first 24 hours and we’d not have as much information displayed before the 96-hour max)

The recording delay for crash pings is the time between the crash happening and the user restarting their browser. As expected, most users appear to restart their browser immediately. Even the slowest channel (release) has over 80% of its crash pings recorded within two days.

Submission Delay

The submission delay for crash pings, as with all pings, is the time between the creation of the ping and the sending of the ping. What makes the crash ping special is that it isn’t even created until the browser has restarted, so I expected these to be quite short:

They do not disappoint. Every branch but Nightly has 9 out of every 10 crash pings sent within minutes of it being created.

Nightly is a weird one. It starts off having the worst proportion of created pings unsent, but then becomes the best.

Really, all four of these lines should be within an error margin of just being a flat line at the top of the graph, since the code that creates the ping is pretty much the same code that sends it. How in the world are these many crash pings remaining unsent at first, but being sent eventually?

Terribly mysterious.

Combined Delay

The combined client delay for crash pings shows that we ought to have over 80% of all crash pings from all channels within a day or two of the crash happening. The coarseness of the crashDate measure makes it hard to say exactly how many and when, but the curve is clearly a much faster one than for the main ping delays previously examined.

Crash Rates

For crash rates that use crashes counted from crash pings and some normalization factor (like usage hours) counted from main pings, it doesn’t actually matter how fast or slow these pings come in. If only 50% of crashes and 50% of usage hours came in within a day, the crash rate would still be correct.

What does matter is when the pings arrive at different speeds:

(Please forgive my awful image editing work)

Anywhere that the two same-coloured lines fail to overlap is a time when the server-recorded count of crashes from crash pings will not be from the same proportion of the population as the sever-recorded count of usage hours from main pings.

For example: On release (dark blue), if we look at the crash rate at 22 or 30-36 hours out from a given period, the crash rate is likely to approximate what a final tally will give us. But if we check early (before 22h, or between 22 and 30h), when the main pings are lagging, the crash rate will seem higher than reality. If we check later (after 36h), the crash rate will seem lower.

This is where the tyranny of having a day-resolution crashDate really comes into its own. If we could model exactly when a channels’ crash and main submission proportions are equal, we could use that to generate accurate approximations of the final crash rate. Right now, the rather-exact figures I’m giving in the previous paragraph may have no bearing on reality.

Conclusion

If we are to use crash pings and main pings together to measure “something”, we need to fully understand and measure the differences in their client-side delays. If the curves above are stable, we might be able to model their differences with some degree of accuracy. This would require a higher-resolution crash timestamp.

If we wish to use this measured “something” earlier than 24h from the event (like, say, to measure how crashy a new release is), we need to either chose a method that doesn’t rely on main pings, or speed up main ping reporting so that it has a curve closer to that of crash pings.

To do my part I will see if having a better crash timestamp (hours would do, minutes would be the most I would need) is something we might be willing to pursue, and I will lobby for the rapid completion and adoption of pingSender as a method for turning main pings’ submission delay CDF into a carbon copy of crash pings’.

Please peruse the full analysis on reports.telemetry.mozilla.org if you are interested in the details of how these graphs were generated.

:chutten