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BAD_POOL_CALLER? What the …
29 August 08 06:00 AM

From time to time, a customer support incident for a bugcheck will make its way over to us on the Performance team.  Those of you that have worked with support engineers on the Performance team already know that we generally don’t work with bugcheck Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 0 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Symbols and You
18 July 08 06:00 AM

In our last post, we discussed what symbols were and why they were important in debugging. Today, we’re going to take a look at how to set up your symbols for debugging. Setting up the symbols can be a daunting exercise. This is especially true if you Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, troubleshooting

What are Symbols For?
15 July 08 06:00 AM

We’ve mentioned Symbols in several different posts related to debugging and troubleshooting – but we’ve never actually discussed what symbols are and what they are used for.  Today, we’ll rectify that oversight and provide a quick overview of symbol Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 0 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, troubleshooting

Two Minute Drill: UMDH.EXE
08 July 08 06:00 AM

Hello there! My name is Mike and I am an Escalation Engineer with the Platforms team. I’ve been reading the AskPerf blog for a while and wanted to share some information about a very useful troubleshooting tool. A quick word of warning though – to really Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 5 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, performance, troubleshooting, two minute drill

Access Violation? How dare you ...
03 June 08 06:00 AM

I am sure we have all seen access violations occur since we took ownership of our first x86 PC's.  The infamous "Bluescreen", application crashes, it doesn't really matter, access violations are all over the place.  For any of you Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, troubleshooting

Two Minute Drill: Find /3GB without using boot.ini
27 May 08 06:00 AM

We've talked a lot about the /3GB switch and its effect on system resources in previous posts.  Today we are going to discuss how to determine whether or not /3GB is enabled on a 32-bit system without looking at the boot.ini file or using MSCONFIG.EXE.  Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 5 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting, two minute drill

Troubleshooting Server Hangs – Part Four
16 May 08 06:00 AM

Welcome to Part Four of our Server Hang troubleshooting series. Today we are going to discuss PTE depletion and Low Physical Memory conditions and how those two issues can lead to server hangs. In our post on the /3GB switch we mentioned that in general, Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Server Hangs – Part Three
09 May 08 06:00 AM

In our last post on Server Hangs, we discussed using the Debugging Tools to examine a dump file to analyze pool depletion.  Today we are going to look at using our troubleshooting tools to examine a server hang caused by a handle leak.  Issues Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 2 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Server Hangs – Part Two
06 May 08 06:00 AM

Several months ago, we wrote a post on Troubleshooting Server Hangs .  At the end of that post, we provided some basic steps to follow with respect to server hangs.  The last step in the list was following the steps in KB Article 244139 to prepare Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 2 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Using Special Pool to find out who is allocating a Pool Tag
15 April 08 06:00 AM

OK, a quick disclaimer right at the start.  The steps we discuss in this post assume that you are very comfortable with kernel debugging, and in particular live debugging.  This is a bit of a niche post, but it is a question that we get every Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 1 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

Using Process Explorer without an Internet Connection
08 April 08 06:00 AM

Last year when we wrote our post on Memory Management – Understanding Pool Resources we mentioned that it was possible to use Process Explorer to view the limit for both Paged and NonPaged Pool.  In that post  we mentioned that you would Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 1 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, troubleshooting

WS2008: Windows Error Reporting
05 February 08 06:00 PM

Day Five ... only twenty-two more days to go till Launch Day.  On the menu today - Windows Error Reporting. Starting with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1, Windows Error Reporting (WER) can be configured to collect full user-mode dump files Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 8 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, troubleshooting, windows server 2008

WS2008: Service Shutdown and Crash Handling
04 February 08 06:00 AM

Welcome to Day Four of our series leading up to the Windows Server 2008 Launch. Hopefully you had a good weekend - many of you were probably up watching the Super Bowl. Of course, it's Monday morning now - time to get to back to work. Today's topics: Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 3 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, troubleshooting, windows server 2008

Understanding Crash Dump Files
08 January 08 06:00 AM

At the end of 2007 we talked about Bugchecks and why they happen .  Today we're going to talk about the Crash Dump files themselves - the different types of dumps, how the dumps themselves are generated and why you will need a correctly sized page Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

What a Heap of ... (Part Two)
29 June 07 05:14 AM

On Tuesday, we talked about Heap - what it is and how it works. Today we're going to continue our look at Heap. At the end of the last post we mentioned Look-Aside Lists and Low Fragmentation Heap. But before we dive into those, let's take a look at Heap Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting