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This page is for listing ideas about what Breakpad's web interface could do for us.

Stuff from deffered storage thread

• need to be able to run reports for nascent security exploits
• users can't resubmit crash reports
• is server-side throttling and deferral the right thing to do long-term?
• what could we change in the client to improve user experience? efficiency?

Features to Implement

• Topcrash lists -- but hopefully a little smarter for the scarier stack traces, see bug 304769. --Jesse
  • Even if we find a way to process our crash dumps against MS symbols files, we are likely to get a lot of crashes with stack frames not very useful to us, so we need to make sure we present crash incidents with the most useful "stack signature" as possible.

Reporting

• QuickSearch/FastFind Query tools
  • Depending on what type of data we end up collecting from clients, we need to make sure we create a similar query tool to what exists now at http://talkback-public.mozilla.org
• Reports
  • The current reports available through http://talkback-public.mozilla.org provide a lot of useful information that is easy to digest from release to release and on the dev. branches. The current set of reports are generated daily from data dumps of 10 days worth of crashes. The scripts are pretty old and should not be reused. Changes to what we collect from Breakpad will help us decide what types of reports we can create.
  • I would like to determine which reports are most useful and then do a rewrite of the scripts or create better web apps to provide better Breakpad data.
• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure)
  • We need to make sure Breakpad is able to collect and report information about session times of clients between crashes, since install, frequency of crashes, etc..
  • MTBF reports for major releases are critical to comparing stability between releases.
  • We used to have MTBF reports and graphs across releases, but I could not get them working, so we currently rely on the daily MTBF calculations in the Reports.
• List of extensions/themes/plugins that are installed on the users computer, see bug 325943, this could be very useful as some crashes are only caused with some particular extension
• Also, I think it could be useful if it were for some people possible to add corresponding bug numbers to certain crashes. This is now happening, but I think that is completely automatic. --mw22

Symbol Collection

• In addition to symbol collection from Windows and from tinderboxen (discussed elsewhere), we should have facilities to upload a PDB file to the server. This can be used to provide symbols for plugins and extension DLLs.
  • Considering that plugins and extensions are responsible for the majority of our crashes (don't quote me on it) and most of our "stack signatures" are Windows system .dlls, this should be a high priority feature for our Breakpad server.
• Maintenance, cleanup, and backup scripts/tools should be designed into the symbols uploading/storage architecture to save people the headache of monitering symbols storage space.

Trends

General

• This page is a list of specific issues/problems/gripes I have with the current webtool UI and functionality; hopefully the Mozilla breakpad webtool can address some of them. —sardisson (Camino QA Lead)