Capture dump with adplus.vbs - wait for debugger to finish ?

Question

I have a web application, that sometimes hangs. I want to investigate the reason, and I need to get a memory dump of the process, when it hangs.

So my idea is to monitor the website, when I am detecting the hang, I want to start a .bat script which captures the memory dump, then runs IISRESET in order to restart so that the site will start responding again.

My problem is, that adplus starts another process (cdb.exe) and returns immediately. I need to wait for cdb.exe to finish, before I can run IISRESET. Is there any way to do that in a batch script ? Or, can I specify on the adplus command line, that it should not return until the memory dump has been collected ?

Answer 1

To create the memory dump of your web application, the Microsoft Debug Diagnostic Tools are your best option.

You can create an "IIS Hang" rule, monitoring a specific URL, and creating a memory dump whenever no response is received within a specified number of seconds.

The Debug Diagnostics Tools will not help you with regard to restarting IIS (or your app pool), but in general the built-in Application Pool restart options should be sufficient for that. If you make sure "Enable Pinging" is set for your AppPool (on its Health tab), and you also set the other Health/Recycling parameters appropriately, your app should continue responding no matter what happens.

If not, monitoring the output folder with crash dumps from your "IIS Hang" DebugDiag rule, and restarting IIS whenever new files appear should definitely do the trick...

Answer 2

Regarding the second part of your question, the answer is yes: you can both (1)specify the wait on the commmand line (as long as you can access to and modify it); and (2)wait for a process to finish in a batch file.

In their simplest form, do

(1) use START /WAIT cdb parms instead of just cdb parms

(2) try FOR /F "tokens=1,2" %a in ('TASKLIST ^| FIND /I "cdb.exe"') DO @ECHO %a %b and substitute ECHO for the command you want.