ANTS 4 OMP abort error

Question

I have downloaded the trial versions of ANTS and dotTrace profilers.

When profiling in ANTS, at a certain point the program stops and I get this error in a Console window:

system error(-2147467259): __kmp_setaffinity: SetThreadAffinityMask: Unspecified error

OMP abort: fatal system error detected.

The program profiles without drama in dotTrace.. What does the error mean and is it a problem with my code or with ANTS?

Answer 1

ANTS Profiler needs to set the thread affinity to save having to implement complicated cross-thread synchronization that would slow down the application and introduce serious complication to the Profiler code.

This is done using the Win32 API function "SetThreadAffinityMask" -- the failure message leaves a lot to be desired, but what you could do as a workaround is open %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Red Gate\ANTS Performance Profiler 5\PerformanceProfilerSettings.xml and change "UseThreadAffinity" to False.

If any problems occur during profiling, you could try downloading a third-party program to set the affinity for your application.