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!),...

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...

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 so often, so we figured we’d share the information...

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 need to install the Microsoft Debugging Tools and...

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 and store them locally after a user-mode application...

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: Service Shutdown and Crash Handling. Prior to Windows...

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 file.  So, let's get started ... By default...

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 Synchronization. The heap manager supports concurrent...

Following on from our posts on the Basic Troubleshooting Toolkit and Basic Debugging of an Application Crash , let's talk about actually capturing Application crash dumps and failures. Most administrators are familiar with the Dr. Watson for Windows tool that has been around since the days of Windows...

One of our common issues is troubleshooting application crashes (for example, the Print Spooler or a third-party application). These crashes usually result in the infamous Dr. Watson error. First, let's discuss terminology. A crash is when something experiences a fault and has no choice but to exit....

In our previous post on Preparing to Troubleshoot we referred to several different tools and basic troubleshooting questions. In our upcoming posts we will be discussing several troubleshooting techniques, so this seemed like an ideal time to discuss useful troubleshooting tools. We're not going to discuss...