Usually (probably always I hope) when troubleshooting production environments we don´t have Visual Studio or other “nice looking” tools to help us finding problems. But we have one of my favorite tools: Windbg. The first time someone showed me Windbg...

To me one of the most useful commands when using windbg is .shell. According to Debugging Tools For Windows documentation “The .shell command launches a shell process and redirects its output to the debugger, or to a specified file.” So, why would...

From time to time i get some memory dumps related to classic ASP. Last month I got some and the symptom was slow performance or event total hang with all requests just sitting around. Typically when i´m looking at a classic ASP memory dump I like to...

I´m starting a new section called Tips with the goal of showing commands that are very useful when doing memory dump analysis. The first one is on how to get a image loaded into memory to file. When i´m looking at a managed memory dump almost always...

Consider the scenario where you take several memory dumps from SQL Server because you are getting very high CPU without apparent reason. After looking at this memory dumps you notice that almost every thread has a call stack similar to the one below then...

Recently in one of our internal forums there was this thread around debugging different architectures (IA64, AMD64,x86) and the right environment to analyze the memory dump. If you have a IA64 memory dump then you will have to use a IA64 architecture...