Silent crash in Visual Studio 2008 c++ application

Question

Hi

We have a unmanaged C++ TCP server application running as a Windows service that is silently crashing after few days of run on Win2003 server. There is no Dr. Watson log file getting generated (no issue with Dr. Watson log as it catches other crashes in same application). Due to lack of Dr. Watson log file, we are unable to progress on how to debug this further..

The TCP server application is sort of HTTP processor. It connects to wide range of webserver and processes data.

Can someone please guide me what can be done to debug the silent crashes.. There are 1000+ users connected to this server at any instant and thus its not possible to run the same in debug mode. The crash is not reproducible and happens once in 5-10 days on one of the 6 servers..

Any tool that can help to debug these silent crashes. The application is a pure C++ application without any MFC or STL..

Thanks in Advance.

Krishna

Answer 1

The last time I had a silent crash problem like this, it was because of C runtime parameter validation., which by default just calls TerminateProcess without any other goodness (depending on which version of msvcrt*.dll you link to). If this is the cause of your problem, you can avoid it by calling _set_invalid_parameter_handler and giving a handler that either calls DebugBreak (forcing a crash) or does nothing, allowing an error code to be returned to the caller. Details in the link above.