Intro to using the Windows Debugger

Windows Debugger can be downloaded as part of the Windows SDK. I would install both the 32 and 64bit versions.

I used it in the past when diagnosing why a website was performing poorly during peak periods. Users would hit the website url, wait for 30+ seconds and then the site would appear quickly. Even the home page which did nothing (i.e. no db hits), was slow to appear.

I got a memory dump from the server and using the analysis approach below could see that all available IIS worker threads were in use and all were busy rendering. The server was starved of threads and user requests were ending up in a queue waiting to be processed.

I tweaked the IIS settings and added more worker threads. The problem went away. Thanks Windows Debugger!

How do you to get a memory dump?

1. Open a command prompt
2. Get the list of worker process ids:
  • %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD list wps
    • Your worker process should be in the list
3. Change to the Debugging Tools directory. On my machine that was at:
  • cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Debuggers\x86 4. Create a directory for the memory dump. I went with c:\dumps
5. Run the following, substituting your process id for xxxx:
  • ADPlus -Hang -p xxxx -quiet -o c:\dumps. You'll end up with a .dmp file in the c:\dumps folder.

Opening the memory dump in WinDBG

1. Run WinDBG. You'll see something similar to the following:

2. Goto File -> Open Crash Dump. You should then see something similar to the following:

3. Set the symbol path:
  • .sympath srv*c:\Symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
  • .symfix
  • .reload 

4. Load the .Net CLR
  • .Net 3.5: .loadby sos mscorwks
  • .. or for .Net 4.0: .loadby sos clr

Working out what each of the threads are doing

1. Get the list of threads in the memory dump
  • !Threads -special 

2. Switch to a ThreadPoolWorker thread, e.g. thread 11:
  • ~11s 

3. Get the stacktrace for this thread
  • !clrstack 

Using the stacktrace, you can then see what the thread is doing. Switch then to a different thread to see what it is doing. Using this approach I could work out that all threads were busy doing normal activities and that the website just needed more worker threads.

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