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Hello, world! We're often challenged with a process that exits unexpectedly, but this doesn't always equate to an application "crash".  Occasionally this behavior is caused by cross-process termination, where one process terminates another one. Discovering root cause of this behavior used...

Hello, and welcome to our second post in the Windows 7 launch series. This post is going to be a long one, so buckle in. We’re going to start with an overview of Fault Tolerant Heap, which is a new feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and then go over some Memory Management pieces. If you...

Good morning AskPerf! We’ve had plenty of discussions in the past about Pool Memory – both Paged and NonPaged. Today we’re going to review how we can determine the Pool Memory usage from a memory dump file via the !poolused command. A quick note – if you’re trying to identify a leaking pool tag, analyzing...

Happy Friday AskPerf! No alphabet soup or Sesame Street quips today. Today, we’re going to take a quick look at two debugger commands that you can use to examine memory use, !vm and !memusage . Why two commands? One shows you information about virtual memory usage ( !vm ) and the other one displays information...

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been posting quite a bit on different topics related to Debugging .  Today we’re continuing in that vein by looking at one of the most common commands that we use when reviewing both kernel- and user-mode dump files – !analyze .  !analyze is an extension command...

I know – it really does seem like I’m on a bit of a Sesame Street kick at the moment, doesn’t it? Ah well - it is Friday and the weekend is almost upon us. Why not have a little fun? Today, we’re continuing on with looking at different debugger commands. Our topic for today is the lm command and its...

Good morning AskPerf! 2009 is moving fast – it’s hard to believe we’re already into August! Today, we’re continuing on with our debugging focus. Over the next few posts, we’ll be looking at different command types within the debugger. Today’s post is brought to you by the letter … k. I know, I couldn...

Welcome back AskPerf!  Carrying on with our debugging / architectural theme from the last couple of weeks, today’s topic is about the stack.  A stack is a way of storing information – a data structure.  When a new object is placed on the stack it is placed on the top of the stack. ...

Good Morning AskPerf!  Today is the last in our series on Windows Synchronization Mechanisms.  Our topic today is Semaphore Objects.  A semaphore object is a kernel-mode synchronization object that maintains a count between zero and a maximum specified value.  Semaphores are similar...

Good Morning AskPerf! We’re continuing on with our mini-series on Synchronization Mechanisms today with a look at Mutexes. A mutex is a synchronization object. Mutexes ensure mutually exclusive (hence the term) access. In other words, while one thread has the mutex, all other threads are prevented from...

Good morning AskPerf! I realize it’s been a couple of weeks or so since we’ve posted. The reason is that we’ve all been a bit busy trying to wrap up the end of our fiscal year, write our reviews and of course, there was the Fourth of July holiday in there as well. But, we’re now back and we’re going...

Happy Friday AskPerf.  My name is Syed Yusuf, and I am a Support Engineer on the Performance team.  Application crash issues can be somewhat tricky to resolve – especially if we’re dealing with a third party application.  Today we’re going to take a look a the Application Verifier tool...

Back in “the old days”, you could use a ball-point pen to break into the debugger .  No, I haven’t stayed too long at the fair – you could use the tip of the ball-point pen to short the nearest pair of pins to create a hardware crash dump.  Obviously this isn’t recommended (or supported!),...

There are times when tools such as DebugDiag, ADPlus or UserDump fail to capture a dump when a process terminates unexpectedly.  When that happens, we can launch the process inside the debugger to ensure that we capture a dump.  Here’s how we do it: Install the Debugging Tools for Windows Copy...

Hi AskPerf readers, Don Geddes here again.  Today we’re going to look at Windows Error Reporting logging in Windows Server 2008 and how it can affect the Printing subsystem.  There was a KB article written a while back that discussed the Windows Error Reporting service logging and how it was...

It occurred to me that with so many technical blogs out there, that it might be useful to bring you some posts from our fellow bloggers here at Microsoft that have been published recently … If you haven’t been keeping up with our colleagues over at the Terminal Services blog, then you may have missed...

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 issues.  Our Setup / Cluster team has that...

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 consider the fact that one module has several different...

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 files.  Whenever an application or DLL is...

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 get the most out of this tool, you need to be...

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 that remember the good old Windows 9x days, a General...

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.  Finding out this information is not as...

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, a system should always have around 10,000 free...

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 where there are an abnormal number of handles for...

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 the system to capture a complete memory dump...