Will it make any difference if I grab a Dr Watson crash dump on a hung process, instead of ADPlus hang dump?
Thank you Surya
A:
Dr. Watson will only generate a crash dump if the process actually crashes. If the process only hangs without a crash, then Dr. Watson will never be invoked. ADPlus is designed to be able to capture information on a hang while a process is still running.
Microsoft has some information on ADPlus that may be helpful in explaining the differences between the tools.
Greg Hewgill
2009-01-21 00:00:30
Sorry, my question was not on how to grab the dump, but is there any difference on the dump generated, if I took a Dr Watson dump of a hung process, of course this process would be killed by DrWatson after creating the dump, but I don't mind.
2009-01-21 00:04:59
My understanding is that ADPlus automates the process of obtaining dumps from various different debugging tools. So if ADPlus obtains a Dr. Watson dump, then that's what it is. If it obtains a different type of dump, then it may be a different format but should contain the same information.
Greg Hewgill
2009-01-21 00:29:50
+2
A:
I created a full dump with adplus -hang and drwtsn32 and used dumpchk to compare the two. Both are full dumps, but the flags used are different (on XP sp3)
Drwatson:
0002 MiniDumpWithFullMemory
0004 MiniDumpWithHandleData
Hang Mode ADPlus:
0002 MiniDumpWithFullMemory
0004 MiniDumpWithHandleData
0020 MiniDumpWithUnloadedModules
0800 MiniDumpWithFullMemoryInfo
1000 MiniDumpWithThreadInfo
So unless you need that sort of extra information from the dump - configuring DrWatson to give you a full memory dump is as good as using adplus. More info on these flags can be found at debugInfo.com.
Tony Lee
2009-01-21 06:45:36
A:
If you are interested in learning about how Windows detects apphangs we have added some posts to this on the Windows Error Reporting blog:
Let there be hangs part 1 of 4 Let there be hangs part 2 of 4 Let there be hangs part 3 of 4 Let there be hangs part 4 of 4
Important to note is that this information when sent through Microsoft's Windows Error Reporting gets communicated to the software developers to try and fix these issues. If you are sending in your error reports you WILL help fix issues that are occuring on your PC!
I am a Program Manager at Microsoft on the Windows Error Reporting team.